To call Roland Emmerich's 2012 a good film would be wrong. The Shawshank Redemption is a good film, good gilms make you feel emotions and make you care for the characters. In 2012 John Cusack and his family get stuck behind two old dears in an old cadillac driving quite slowly. One of the old dears says to the other "here you hold these eggs Martha" or whatever the fuck her name was, but this all happens as they are being chased by the biggest earthquake never recorded. What's that you say? Earthquakes can't chase people? Of course they can. What's more is that earthquakes have an uncanny knowledge of comical timing in the sequence that follows. Cusack beeps at the old women and then decides to mount the pavement and charge through some front gradens. The camera then shifts to show the elderly motorists chugging along parallel only to have a big piece of ground shoot up and smack them in the face. INSTANT DEATH.
What follows is even more ridiculous, but equally enjoyable as Cusack and co manage to cheat death and fly away thanks to that surgeon that took a few flying lessons. The film then proceeds to present you with implausible CGI catastrophes mixed with long boring talking scenes that don't really connect you to the characters, but help make the billion foot tidal waves and surprise volcanoes all the more fun by comparison.
Now I get to the crux of this review and it is this. You have to see this film for one moment alone very near the beginning. When Chiwetel Ejiofor is talking to his Indian friend in a hot room underground there is a totally gratuitous shot of a man pouring ice into a bucket where another man is cooling his feet and after the initial hiss of the ice melting in the water subsides the man says, ".... Oh that is velly gud".
It's not a good film, but it's an enjoyable film. They save the puppy and kill the russian, but at least our dear Queen is saved.
Go see it if you are patient and have a good sense of the absurd. 7/10
P.S. Woody Harrelson is in it
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