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"Director: Roland Emmerich Screenwriters: Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser Starring: John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Woody Harrelson, Oliver Platt, Danny Glover, Thomas McCarthy, Jimi Mistry Running Time: 158 mins Certificate: 12A So amused were South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone by the script for Roland Emmerich&amp;#039;s The Day After Tomorrow, they wanted to film it themselves using puppets as a spoof of Hollywood&amp;#039;s big budget blockbusters. Those plans never transpired, though the duo did eventually make Team America: World Police, and cinema is probably a better place for it. If Stone and Parker were able to find unintentional comedy in Tomorrow, then they&amp;#039;d surely have a field day with 2012, Emmerich&amp;#039;s ultra-silly tale of the end of days as foretold by a Mayan prophecy. 2012 is a bad film, utterly stupid at times, but there&amp;#039;s fun - hearty laughs, even - to be had at just how rubbish it is. Emmerich, a sort of modern-day Irwin Allen, sets up his latest cinematic apocalypse with vaguely plausible sounding science guff. Magnetic poles are reversed, the Earth&amp;#039;s crust turns to liquid, neutrinos get mentioned at one point... carnage inevitably ensues. By the time Woody Harrelson&amp;#039;s pickle-loving &amp;#039;end is nigh&amp;#039; radio DJ surfaces, all sense of verisimilitude has fallen by the wayside and it&amp;#039;s time to stop taking 2012 seriously and accept its hilarity. Emmerich places family drama at the centre of the pyrotechnics - John Cusack&amp;#039;s unsuccessful author is still involved in bringing up his and his estranged wife&amp;#039;s (Peet) kids - and inevitably the natural disasters bring them closer together. At no point, though, does the human interaction take priority over the digital spectacle. Emmerich&amp;#039;s newest take on the end of humanity is rife with clumsy dialogue, set pieces that range from the sublime to the shoddily-greenscreened ridiculous, and gloriously crude gags. The sight of Queen Elizabeth II attempting to wrangle a couple of corgis into a mankind-saving ark and a heavily-accented Austrian governor declaring &amp;quot;thee vorst iz oveeer!&amp;quot; just as a giant earthquake strikes are two of the highlights. Also worth noting is a crack in a crucial place on the roof of the Sistine Chapel and a bizarre news report namedrop of Diana when a character loses his life in the same Paris tunnel that claimed the Princess. 2012 may have moments to top the absurdity of Jake Gyllenhaal trying to outrun a drop in temperature in The Day After Tomorrow, but at least it steers away from that film&amp;#039;s awkward eco-preaching and just gets down to destruction. A cheesefest on an epic scale, 2012 is a case of computer processors working overtime to compensate for a lack of action on Emmerich and co-writers Harald Kloser&amp;#039;s word processor. There are valiant attempts at acting from the ensemble, notably by Brit thesp Chiwetel Ejiofor as a government official caught in bureaucratic mire, but it&amp;#039;s all in vain as the humans inevitably feel about as alive as the Team America marionettes. Cusack is stripped of his usual laid-back charm amid the noise and Danny Glover&amp;#039;s stoic President appears a cheap substitute for Morgan Freeman&amp;#039;s Deep Impact commander in chief (he&amp;#039;s seen one apocalypse too many, perhaps?). Leave your brain in the cinema lobby before seeing this one.  &amp;gt; What do you think of the movie? Share your views "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/review/a185426/2012/>