As a director Roland Emmerich is known for two things, action packed, edge of your seat epic disaster movies and poorly written, pathetically acted, unwatchable disgraces to cinema. So the ultimate question becomes is 2012 more Independence Day and Day After Tomorrow or is it more Godzilla and 10,000 B.C.? Well I can tell you it sure as hell isn’t the first two.

This movie isn’t as much a disaster film so much as it is a disaster of a film. For those of you that have had the unfortunate fate to have seen 10,000 B.C. I can tell you 2012 isn’t a whole lot better. The acting is really bad, the script is even worse and dear God the thing just will never frickin end!

Let me start however with the positives, well what little positive things there were. The CG affects were top notch. The disaster scenes were epic, even more so than those seen in The Day After Tomorrow. These are what brought people to the theatre and they did not disappoint. Seeing California disappear into the Pacific Ocean was one of the most fantastical moments in disaster film history.

Entertaining too was a cameo appearance by one Woody Harrelson. The opening of the film was about as slow moving and dry as can be and without his entertaining portrayal of a conspiracy nut the film would have lost the audience much earlier than it ultimately did. This however is a double edge sword and ultimately leads to the films biggest failure.

It has no identity. In every aspect it tries to play things both ways and as a fan of films you know that never ends well.

For starters rather than play it like a straight drama as we saw in The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich puzzlingly instead decides to add in extremely cheesy and annoying comedy. The scenes of disasters surrounding all this dumb comedy however are delivered with raw realism. Buildings are collapsing and people are falling out of them to their deaths like we all saw when the twin towers fell and the film is cracking Disney channel level jokes during all this. The world is ending, billions of people are dying, and dying before you ON SCREEN and we are getting Hannah Montana level jokes about mosquito bites, breast implants, racial stereo types, dumb blondes and exposed ass cracks. To put things in perspective 2012 made the comedy of Race To Witch Mountain look mature and eloquent. I cannot under score enough how big of a problem this was. Emmerich sets up scenes to have really raw emotional responses from the crowd but then he completely pulls the rug out from under himself with stupid comedy and over the top unbelievable action sequences.

Now you could describe John Cusack as many things, but one of those things would certainly not be tough guy. I would find it unbelievable to see him defeat a woman in a fight let alone see him pull of the Jason Statham level stunts his character achieves in this flick. Again the problem arises of Emmerich trying to have it both ways. He picks Cusack to play an every man, weak and helpless, which works if you make them weak and helpless! He even goes so far as painting the picture of him as this weak pathetic shell of a man who cant even father his own children or care enough to fight for his marriage, but then when the action starts what do we get? John frackin Cusack jumping cars through buildings like hes the Transporter. Jumping RV’s over lava filled craters and I kid you not, driving a car out of a crashing airliner onto an Icy Mountain. Yes. John Cusack. Un-frickin-believable! If you want it to be an action film then cast an action star. Casting an actor who usually plays, lets just say, less than masculine characters is an epic failure.

Also not to be underestimated is how poor and clunky the script is written. Pick a Hollywood cliché and you’ll find it here. This script redefines “by the numbers.”.

Pilot dying and someone with flight experience stepping in… Check.

Dumb blonde girl getting who cares more about her dog than surviving herself… Check.

Escaping at the last minute every single time… Check.

I could go on… And on.

To paint the picture of the craptastic levels this script hits I give you these particular examples.

John Cusacks character is a divorced writer who is a limo driver part time. He drives around the film’s Russian Billionaire who just so happens to be married to a hot blonde who gets plastic surgery from Cusack’s ex-wife’s new husband. Holy sitcom plot but that’s not all. The book he wrote only sold 500 copies yet the main geologist who discovers everything is currently reading it and low and behold they end up meeting! Great writing guys you might just have a future writing for CSI.

The most insulting part of the film however is the double sided government plot. They are pure evil and have numerous people killed to protect their secret throughout the course of the film, they use slave labor, leave billions to die horrible deaths to save only the rich, yet one heart felt speech changes all their minds? Are you f’n kidding me?

The film is ridiculously long as well clocking in at around an intolerable 2 hours and 30 mins. Now I’m not against long movies if they need to be that length. This however did not. We get treated to side stories featuring characters that are secondary to the secondary characters. This too is one of those movies where the world is falling to bits but the characters have all the time in the world to stop and discuss things and by things I don’t mean how they will survive, I mean why the girl got a boob job. You know. What we’d all be discussing if we were likely going to die soon. The CG scenes grow old fast as well, unlike The Day After Tomorrow the variety is sparse. We get Earthquakes, Lava and floods, rinse and repeat 10 times.

That is only about half the fail. To truly convey how awful this movie is would take a 25 page paper. So basically my final statement is…

RUN! As far away from this film as possible. If someone tries to make you go see it they are not your friend. Cut them from your life. If you feel the impulse to see this just remember 10,000 B.C. and if that doesn’t work, well, all I gotta say is…

I warned you.

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