My Amazon Movie Reviews: 2012

It's the end of the world as we know it, and they feel fine
2 out of 5 Stars

2012 is a movie where all the heroes escape by the thinnest of plots...I mean margins. It's the old fashioned disaster movie where a handful of actors dodge impossible odds and impending doom always seems to be just a wee bit slower than the plane/car/small dog racing in front of the collapsing ground/raging fireball/crushing metal machinery. It's B-Movie dumb with 21'st century technology. It will kill off 2 and a half hours of your afternoon and few brain cells in the process.

Director Roland Emmerich obviously learned a lesson from the wretchedly awful 10,000 BC (I joked that the BC then stood for Bad Cinema), where wafer thin plots better have a lot of things going ka-boom if the audience is going to plop down ticket money. This time, at almost every turn, you get a gloriously apocalyptic slice o'disaster. Be it the raining of molten fireballs on Jellystone park or the collapse of California into the Pacific, the effects are incredible. 2012 is the best disaster porn since "Titanic," and you don't have to wade through all those stuffy period dress. Or, for that matter, the emotional baggage of millions of people dying before your very eyes.

Really, if you had just watched a city of millions get washed off the globe, would you react with giggles and jokes? Because no-one here seems to be all that disturbed that major chunks of the populous have been wiped out. Hardly anyone seems to be capable of shedding tears, save for the President's daughter and the scientific superbrain. With the exception of John Cusak and Woody Harrelson, all the actors here are interchangeable, mere props set against the gloriously delicious mayhem that does keep you on the edge of your seat throughout 2012.

So ignore the implausibility of it all and the sarcastic 2012 political subtext (only politicians and the wealthy will be worth having around post-apocalypse), and thrill to the destruction of the White House by battleship bearing tsunami. It's lights, camera, faultline!