Will the end of the world really be this cheesy and ridiculous?

Rating: 5/10 (11 April 2010)

Eye-popping, cheesy nonsense. A vote of at least five just for having a good laugh at how dumb it gets. Production wise, it's a disaster, and I'm not referring to the earthquakes.
A note to the writer/director: Earthquake faults do not chase people. Not even when they're driving on suburban sidewalks at 100 miles an hour. People do not drive through collapsing buildings or collapsing freeway bridges. Guys with two beginner's flight lessons cannot pilot anything, let alone giant specially designed Russian planes. There is no such thing as a "countdown to tsunami impact" device. No one, not even John Cusack, survives 50,000 life/death situations in a single day without getting killed a few hundred times or so. Nobody on this planet can climb out of an RV falling into a giant sink-hole, and then outrun an airplane on foot, and get pulled into it by the arm as it takes off. That's just a few of this film's outlandish moments. You expect exaggeration and chaos in a disaster movie, but 2012 just blasts you like an atomic bomb.
Forget about the Mayan calendar premise. Instead, we get some nut who looks like a cross between John the Baptist and Howard Stern. He's hiding out with a mammoth radio transmitter in an old trailer in Yellowstone Park, and broadcasts his meandering conspiracy/Armageddon rants. Why nobody triangulate his signal, or notices him hanging from trees yelling at the top of his voice, is never explained. Yet Cusack listens to the guy's ravings from 1,000 miles away in southern California, and hopes to get some map from him.
Other annoying characters: essential divorced father with brat kids. (At least the little girl was good in her role, really the only character worth caring about. But even with her, they introduce a useless sub-plot.) The Russian billionaire or whatever he was and his doggy-toting blonde bimbo? And don't get me started on those twins from a horror movie. Why all these fools? By the way, Oliver Platt is third in the line of Presidential succession, in case you didn't know. Just ask him. Character and story line clichés assault the audience mercilessly. The line "Nothing should come between us," is sad.
After all the explosions, they find a few last things to destroy, until there's finally just nothing left to blow up. Such a whimpering end would never do, so the film desperately resorts to utterly pathetic plot contrivances. Complete with hammered-in schmaltzy sentiment that'll makes your eyes roll so hard they'll hurt. This one is good as a joke only.