Let's Hope the Future Isn't As Bad As This Film

Rating: Null/10 (6 March 2010)

2012 (2009)
* 1/2 (out of 4)
The disaster genre is one of my guilty pleasures and it's funny to think that these films have been around since the 1920s. It's rather amazing that the ones made eight-plus years ago are the same that came in the 1970s and they continued in 2009. What we get are dumb stories with not-so-interesting people, dazzling special effects and a message of sticking together and fighting for your life. We could mention SAN FRANCISCO, EARTHQUAKE, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE and countless others that followed but if you took the silly or unbelievable moments in any of those films and put them together you still wouldn't come close to the dumbness of this films opening hour. The sad thing is that after this dumb hour we still have 90-minutes of dumbness to follow. The only storyline has the world coming to an end with massive earthquakes, volcano eruptions, typhoons and other types of disasters and it's up to a loving father (John Cusack) to make sure that his ex-wife and two kids get aboard a ship that's going to allow certain people to live. OK, I didn't go into this movie expecting some sort of hard-hitting drama but when everything you see is completely stupid then there's really no way to have any sort of emotional connection to what you're watching. Like most disaster movies, you get a boring opening where we're given time to get to know the characters yet we never really have to get to know them because they're always the same. Dad Cusack is obviously being overlooked by the kids due to the great stepfather. We have the nerdy character who wants to save humanity. We have the obnoxious rich guy who only cares for himself. We have the lone nut (Woody Harrelson) who "sees" all of it coming.
There wasn't a single scenario here that I believed and the screenplay is perhaps one of the worst I've ever come across and I watch quite a few movies. The amount of dumbness with incredibly stupid speeches or extremely bad action set ups are just annoying after a while and it all gets off to an incredibly bad start when the first major action scene has Cusack in a limo driving through all of this destruction. Of course, millions and millions of people die yet Cusack manages to get through all of this. Why? No logic is given as it just happens to keep the movie going. Each action scene just keeps getting dumber and dumber, which leads us to the final half-hour where this ship to the future is suppose to be helping everyone and then we have the greedy, evil character coming out and the speech about how we need to go into the future. What's even stranger is why on Earth they needed this thing to run over 150-minutes, which is at least twenty-minutes too long. There are so many characters here that many of them could have been cut out and we wouldn't miss a thing. This would have helped but cutting the running time down since we didn't really get to know any of them anyways. As usual, we get an all star cast with not only Cusack and Harrelson but also Amanda Peet, Danny Glover, Oliver Platt, Chiwetel Ejiofor and many others.
Yes, this was meant to be nothing more than a popcorn movie but I need a little common sense with everything. This movie has none of that and we've seen destruction like this in countless other movies so there's nothing new here and once again we're just going down a road we've seen many, many times before. The CGI effects aren't any better. The obvious fakeness of them make we miss what we got in the 70s. At a point I just finally gave up and began laughing at pretty much everything that was going on. That's not something you want to be doing during a film where billions of people are being killed.