An Unexpected, Transcendently Bad Treat

Rating: 4/10 (24 November 2009)

I really didn't expect much. I knew the resumé's of the players: The Cast, The Producer, The Director. But damn!... Damn!... I had so much fun watching this destruct-orgy... I have to say it was really, really funny. I almost gave this 8 stars, but I was afraid people would get the wrong idea about me... me!? Woody Harrelson had me in tears. John Cusack played it so straight for awhile... then a wink and a nod would peek through... I see... you're in on the joke. I get it. This movie is so over the top, it redefines where the top is. Try fifty-thousand feet higher than you think it should be. I think this film and its relative box-office success have given way to its real achievement: lowering the bar on script development to the point that it would hardly qualify as an English language film. Yet there is the comedy... brilliantly, defiantly staring me in the face, making me laugh though the part in the film where the second act is supposed to go. My ribs are hurting... but nobody spends two hundred million on a comedy! I can't reconcile it. Not even Mozart could construct such a tangled web of coincidence; cliché, coincidence; cliché, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Oh, and the moral crisis... I almost forgot about the moral crisis... it appears in the "third act", stapled to the main scientist guy like a "For Rent" sign on a North Hollywood mailbox on the last day of the month. I wallowed selfishly in the ham-fisted, contrived, thinly woven gauze of the plot, giggling and laughing my way into a sublime euphoria. Even the word "contrived" has lost its measure, its weight. All that is left is the far-away echo that hearkens to a time when movies were made by people that could marshall more than just an escrow account of foreign pre- sales fees, leveraged-hedge-fund-private-equity participations. I wipe away the tears of laughter, with fond memories of the computer-generated images of destruction so perversely maudlin, goofy even, yet vividly realistic-- like a special effects corporate welfare program. Thank you, Roland Emmerich, sir, for not pulling out and shooting your load of cinematic brilliance on the audience's tramp-stamp.