There may be worse movies to come out between now and New Year's Eve, but as Dizzy Dean used to say when he made comparisons, "This one's among 'em."
"2012," a tale of an upcoming Apocalypse as predicted by Mayans, is made for those who set their model trains to crash, or take delight in building sand castles as the tide rises. But then, it was directed and co-written by Roland Emmerich, who appears to live for mass destruction, so a potential viewer is warned.
Emmerich and Harald Kloser kill off several million people, but don't give any of them an interesting line of dialogue, or a speech that makes sense. But they happily destroy Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Francisco, the White House, the Washington Monument, Vatican City, Yellowstone, the Himalayan Mountains, London, Rio de Janiero and lots of other places. Times Square escapes, apparently because Emmerich needed a place for large crowds to gather.
John Cusack is the hero in a large cast of fine actors who left their talent in their dressing rooms and probably waited until dark, then walked backward to the pay window. He's an unsuccessful writer who is a chauffeur for a Russian billionaire, an amusing Zlatko Buric. Cusack and his wife, the one-dimensional Amanda Peet, are divorced, and Peet is hanging around with a dumb doctor (Tom McCarthy). Cusack's son really likes the doctor, so Cusack decides to take the boy and his younger sister on a camping trip. They're in Yellowstone when the world begins to end, and some of Cusack's driving adventures, in an old camper, make Gene Hackman and "The French Connection" driving hi-jinks look like bumper cars in action at a county fair.
The problem is that the earth's core is overheating and about to blow up the earth's crust and shuffle its tectonic plates as if they were a gin rummy hand, both of which do irreparable harm to a planet, even if it has health insurance.
Chiwetel Ejiofor is the good guy, a geologist tipped off by a colleague in India that bad things are about to happen. Ejiofor goes to the White House, meets an oh-so-patient, oh-so-filled with gravitas president played with oh-so-deep sincerity by Danny Glover. He has a cute daughter (Thandie Newton) and an overbearing chief of staff, Mr. Anheuser (German name a coincidence?), played by Oliver Platt as if he were a combination of Dick Cheney all the time and Gen. Alexander Haig on the day Ronald Reagan was shot.
Meanwhile, in Yellowstone, Cusack and the children run into Woody Harrelson, who is broadcasting from a field pack, shouting the news to all and trying to answer questions at the same time. Harrelson is way over the top, but he's fun.
If you're looking for a film with an environmentalist issue, you won't find it here, but you will find all sorts of messages, most of which contradict the previous one. It's an awful movie, with some of the worst dialogue in the history of talking pictures.
But if you like explosions and special effects, this boom's for you.
Opening today at multiple locations
–Joe