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2012
Ben Kenigsberg reviews 2012.
We just didn’t see it coming. Not after the radioactive cheese of Godzilla, not after the unintentional hilarity of The Day After Tomorrow, not even after the sheer nonsense of 10,000 B.C. Nothing had us ready for the mind-numbing idiocy of 2012, a movie that may actually have the power to make viewers in neighboring theaters dumber. Let’s all join hands again as Emmerich takes out, roughly in order, Los Angeles, Yellowstone, Las Vegas, Hawaii, D.C., the Vatican, India and assorted others—though he can hardly be accused of ecumenism. Rio, Tokyo and an Olympics-thralled London are wiped out in newscasts. Africa doesn’t rate a mention until the epilogue. Australia, we can safely presume, has been left out to sea.
We’re told the Mayans predicted this global meltdown, but movie keeps the nature of its cataclysm vague; suffice it to say that, no matter which continent we’re on, it involves Cusack’s quack author–turned–limo driver outrunning various sorts of digital murk. Aided by a cast of characters with convenient hobbies (McCarthy as plastic surgeon who’s been taking flying lessons; Harrelson as the crazy radio personality whose conspiracy theory is correct), he saves his family and learns to be a better dad in the process. As if confined to a single sinking ship, the same half-dozen characters keep bumping into each other over the course of days and thousands of miles. No problem: Presumably we’re hanging on with them and not with the millions wiped out in the tsunami.
Apart from the destruction of L.A.—a genuinely spectacular set piece that involves evading collapsing freeways by car and then by plane—the mayhem has a dutiful feel. With this premise, is there anything that can’t happen? A mountain range moves with the stroke of a pen, and a giant wave rises with the press of a button. (Say what you will about Michael Bay, but at least he has an eye for color.) Most disaster movies resort to such tired devices as the scientist who has all the answers (Ejiofor) and the government stooge who gets everything wrong (Platt), but 2012 is as stingy with its thrills as it is slapdash in its narrative development. Occasional moments of amusement dissipate over the course of an obscene runtime; not even the end of the world is an excuse for this kind of carelessness.
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