All eye-candy, no believability

Rating: 1/10 (6 December 2009)

Some have called the movie "good ol-fashioned, campy fun." I just want my money back. The movie is all eye-candy, and then you're done with the "box" after almost 3 hours. The movie should've been called by its full name: 2012 - A Bucketload of Coincidences.
I'm not even going to provide context in a well-written manner for the horrible parts in the film, so here it goes: Let's start with John Cusack, who plays an author with marital problems, but he must have ESP or psychic abilities to foresee that everything about the near future is dire and in need of escape. He jumps fences which just happen to be controlled by military forces that know of his famous book. He just happens to have written about a mythological topic which seems to be unfolding before his eyes. And his physical abilities to take on these world disasters is amazing. Let's jump to the bad visual jokes, like the one when the couple are in the supermarket, saying "Let's never split up" and then a "small" earthquake literally divides the two hand-holders. It splits the Sistine Chapel in half, right in between where "Adam" touches "God" in the painting. Every escape is near-death and impossible to pull off in real life. Around the end John Cusack seems to possess gills or at least lungs like a fish for as long as he was underwater, as does his son. The music was forgettable and generic, even during the flash-bang explosions of fire and lava and other pyrotechnic crap they threw on the screen.
Then come the questions: in the end, they get away alive on vessels set sail for...wherever. What do they use for fuel after everything's demolished. Or food? What does that giraffe meat taste like, and how soon before Cusack degrades into cannibalism? The ships took in a lot of water...why did they not sink? In fact I was more curious about their outcome after the credits started rolling than I was in the relationship between Cusack and the new step-dad, or any other part of the movie. So everything's destroyed...now what? Good luck.
The best part of the movie was the hilariously-bad animation of Woody Harrelson's character explaining the 2012 concept on his computer...that's it. And that's all of the explanation you'll get about why 2012 was devised by Westerners to be a year of disaster. I was hoping for a real-life, Apocalypto fashion-setting to tell the story of the Mayan calender.
Well, Roland Emmerich said in an interview that it would be his last disaster film, so good riddance to that director of this played-out genre. I hope someone picks up the torch to make a film about the setting after the ships set sail, though.
All in all, its 2009's best comedy, just behind The Hangover.