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Run, John Cusack, Run! | The boiling magma underneath the Earth’s crust attempts to claim another actor in 2012.

2012
Directed by Roland Emmerich. Starring John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt. Now playing.
**

Roland Emmerich finally did it: he destroyed everything. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise, given his track record. In Stargate, he blew up an alien spaceship. In Independence Day, he exploded of most of the world’s important-looking buildings, and a bigger alien spaceship. The Day After Tomorrow had people literally being chased by computer-generated cold. Emmerich’s latest effort raises the destruction bar even further with a heavy reliance on over-the-top animation and John Cusack’s furrowed brow.

2012 capitalizes on the growing paranoia about the imminent end of time, as supposedly predicted by the ancient Mayan Long-Count Calendar, which comes to an end in May of that year. Although there isn’t any concrete evidence that the calendar stoppage signals an apocalypse, that hasn’t stopped former fans of The X-Files from drawing their own conclusions. So armed with this vague notion of total annihilation, Emmerich sets out to create his most spectacular and silly effects orgy yet.

Cusack sleepwalks his way through another performance as Jackson, a divorced father of two and struggling novelist. His ex-wife, played by a stoic Amanda Peet, seems to have left him because Jackson spent too much time on his laptop; she’s since moved on with a smarmy plastic surgeon who wears his scrubs in most scenes to let the audience know that he is, in fact, a doctor. Jackson drives a limo to support his floundering writing career while trying to find a way to reconnect with his rebellious teenage son and sickeningly sweet daughter — if you think you’ve seen this scenario before, it’s because you have: War of the Worlds, 2005. Nothing brings a family together like the end of the world.

Splitting the screen time with Cusack is Chiwetel Ejiofor, playing one of the first scientists to uncover that the earth’s crust is being heated by solar flare neutrinos, or something. His optimistic faith in humanity puts him at odds with Oliver Platt, a pragmatic White House adviser hell-bent on survival who concocts a top secret plan to save at least part of the human race, as well as a giraffe, the Mona Lisa, and President Danny Glover, who is clearly getting too old for this shit.

So is Emmerich. Despite spectacular visual effects, 2012’s action setpieces lack a certain imagination; three separate scenes involve the family taking off in a plane from a crumbling runway, each time with the ease of reaching another level in Donkey Kong. Having emulated ’70s disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure and Earthquake for so long, Emmerich now finds himself with no famous monuments left to vaporize, nothing left for a cute dog to narrowly escape from, and no event to bring the human race together with a large cast of extras fist-pumping and high-fiving each other.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine where Roland Emmerich will go from here — 2012 may well be his last big blockbuster. Unless there’s an Independence Day sequel, that is ... knock on wood.