Movie Review: 2012

I rented 2012 because the special effects in the promos looked promising and John Cusack was in the movie. The film follows Jackson Curtis (Cusack), an author who is down on his luck and trying to form a better relationship with his kids. Curtis takes his kids on a camping trip and discovers more on the trip than he bargained for. A global cataclysm brings an end to the world, leaving Curtis little time to save his ex-wife and kids.

John Cusack typically picks great material to star in (High Fidelity, Being John Malkovich), but 2012 is an action flick with no real screenplay to speak of. To see so many good actors (Cusack, Oliver Platt, Thandie Newton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Woody Harrelson) wasted in the movie was frustrating. With an action flick you expect less in return for the loads of action in the movie but this film was really lacking. Cusack does a good job with what he’s given to work with, which is not much. Chiwetel Ejiofor is very good here, he manages to be believable speaking implausible lines. Woody Harrelson gives a great performance as an eccentric radio show host who predicts the end of the world, one of the highlights of the movie. If the director had taken the entire film with the edgy feel of Harrelson’s performance, you’d have a tongue-in-cheek movie much like “Shaun of the Dead” that would pull the audience into the story.

Audiences have to buy into a story, as good as the sequences of falling freeways and high rises were, special effects can’t make up for the lack of a real story or the poorly written, implausible script. The star of this movie is the special effects, this is a rent it movie if you are into action films.

2009. Written and directed by Roland Emmerich. Starring John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Thandie Newton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Woody Harrelson and Danny Glover.

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