Just watch the trailer, skip the movie

Rating: 5/10 (23 November 2009)

You've seen the trailer for this movie, right? John Cusack and a bunch of B-actors driving through a city that's disintegrating around them, driving through a collapsing building, under a falling freeway, dodging falling cars, debris and people left and right? And then taking off in a plane as the runway collapses beneath them - it's not a sequence you're likely to forget.
I thought the whole film would be pretty much like that - cataclysmically stupid, of course, but a hell of a fun ride. Sure, there would be boring bits of horribly inept characterization, terrible, terrible dialogue (and someone really does say 'But that's IMPOSSIBLE!' quite early on, which was nice) - but those boring bits would be just the filler, a breathing space between huge, insanely entertaining action scenes.
Nope. Not really. The bit from the trailer is by far and away the best action sequence in the movie - there's another couple of bits in planes, and the White House gets wiped out by a flying aircraft carrier, but the rest of the movie mostly consists of those bad, bad character and dialogue scenes I had been dreading. We're supposed to really, really care about these guys, and while the actors are up to the job - except for the kids, who would have been greatly improved by taking a lava bath - they're all playing such clichéd, one-note characters that it's impossible to give a damn.
I really wasn't expecting Shakespeare from this movie. I was just hoping for two and a half hours of dumb fun, but instead I got about 20 minutes of fun, and the rest was trying - and failing - to be serious, and just ended up boring. Note to Roland Emmerich, if he's reading - you aren't any good at serious or deep. Do fun, shallow and demented instead. That's what this movie should have been, but in his ambition to create something more, Emmerich just produced the dullest end-of-the-world movie I can remember seeing.