Rating of
2/4
"2012" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 12/27/11
Scientists discover that the planet's crust is destabilising creating a race against time to save as much of humanity as possible. 2012 has all the ingredients of an Emmerich film; the estranged couple with plucky kids in tow, the noble self-sacrificing president, the conspiracy theorist kook and of course the gleeful trashing of the world's greatest monuments (this time the White House gets squished by an aircraft carrier and the Vatican falls over on the Pope!) It follows the usual formula of spectacular set pieces punctuated with schmaltz and every race against time comes down the the final second and every escape is by a hair's breadth. It actually works quite well for the centre section when they're outrunning earthquakes and volcanos with some truly jaw dropping chases involving cars and aircraft respectively and the scale and effects essentially make his own The Day After Tomorrow virtually redundant. John Cusack is his usual likeable self and Woody Harrelson is unusually bearable as the resident nutter and as a whole it does exactly what it sets out to do. But because the film is at least half an hour too long, by the time it had turned into the Poseidon adventure I got more than a little tired of yet another edge of the seat race against time and had stopped caring, especially since the whole thing was so pointless. At least TDAT had an eco friendly message, here we just have some cobblers about "mutating" neutrinos. Quite how inanimate objects (particularly particles) are meant to mutate I'm not exactly sure, never mind heat up the Earth's core...at least until it's convenient in the plot for them to stop. If you can ignore the gaping flaws in logic and just enjoy a mindless SFX fest then there are worse disaster movies out there but at the same time it's as utterly predictable as I predicted it would be.
