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After the exercise in cinematic banality that was 10,000BC, Roland Emmerich has returned to what he does best, and that's blow shit up on a mammoth scale. And you don't really get much bigger than the destruction of planet earth. Having ended the world in a similar fashion a few years back with The Day After Tomorrow, this is hardly original stuff, as the German helmer rips off his own work as much as other directors - while his dialogue still plays like it was written by someone who learnt English watching Michael Bay movies. Still, the $260 million he reportedly spent is still very much on the screen, as the destruction of the planet becomes one long money shot after another.

The Mayan calendar predicts that the world as we know it will end in 2012, so, really, this is sort of like a pre-emptive documentary. An eclectic mix of characters are introduced, including Chiwetel Ejiofor's scruple-ridden scientist, Danny Glover's scruple-ridden president, and Oliver Platt's scrupleless politician. But our protagonist is John Cusack's failed writer, who discovers, through some mind-numbing coincidences, just what the US government is planning to do. Desperate to save his estranged family, as all hell breaks loose around the world, it's a race against time to find a way to some safe land, and the "spaceships" the government has built to save a select few in order to reboot humanity.

2012 is essentially another one of those blockbusters that delivers the goods in terms of following up the action that the trailer promised, but fails in most other respects. Cusack and Ejiofor are both consistently better than the material they're given; managing to come away with their dignity intact despite some atrocious lines. Ejiofor's rousing speech towards the end is embarrassingly cheesy, but c'mon, this is the guy who directed Independence Day - he's not exactly Diablo Cody. The audience wants to see stuff be destroyed in an extravagant, overblown fashion and Emmerich knows how to do that very well.

Clocking in at damn near two and a half hours, you may get slightly tired with a conclusion that seems like it's never gonna come, but it does deliver on the action front and, for most, that is where the attraction will lie. This is firmly a film from the director of Godzilla and ID4; which is either a compliment or a slate, depending on what you thought of those two blockbusters.

Review by Mike Sheridan