Now we know how the world ends &mdash; with a whimper, a very loud whimper.</p><p>That&rsquo;s the conundrum of &ldquo;2012&rdquo;: We&rsquo;re so bored by the human characters we end up rooting for the apocalypse.</p><p>Director Roland Emmerich, who has made a career of putting Earth in jeopardy (&ldquo;Independence Day,&rdquo; &ldquo;Godzilla,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Day After Tomorrow&rdquo;), pretty much cooks the globe in this tale of planetary surprise and cataclysmic upheaval. </p><p>But it sure takes him a while to get there. The first hour of &ldquo;2012&rdquo; is devoted to introducing characters we don&rsquo;t care about in clich&eacute;d situations.</p><p>Failed sci-fi writer Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) takes a vacation with his kids (Morgan Lily, Liam James), who are living with his ex-wife, Kate (Amanda Peet), and her new boyfriend, Gordon (Tom McCarthy), a plastic surgeon as responsible as Jackson is unreliable.</p><p>Meanwhile, government scientist Adrian (Chiwetel Ejiofor) zips around the world trying to get a handle on weird and disturbing developments: disruptive sun flares, bombardment of Earth by radioactive neutrinos, the overheating of our planet&rsquo;s core.</p><p>The world&rsquo;s crust is destabilizing. It begins with little tremors and fissures. These escalate into volcanic eruptions, devastating earthquakes and massive tidal waves that roar hundreds of miles over the continents.</p><p>Seems that the ancient Mayan prediction that the Earth would end in 2012 was right. A super-secret government project headed by a powerful bureaucrat (Oliver Platt) has been working on a plan to save at least a fraction of mankind by building in the Himalayas gigantic &ldquo;arks&rdquo; and quietly selling berths to the filthy rich for $1 billion each. (D&eacute;j&agrave; vu? It&rsquo;s almost exactly the same plot as in 1951&rsquo;s &ldquo;When Worlds Collide.&rdquo;) </p><p>As the end nears, the president (Danny Glover, because Morgan Freeman must have been busy) begins to regret the ruse that has kept most of the Earth&rsquo;s citizens (including his daughter, Laura, played by Thandie Newton) in the dark. He appeals to humanity&rsquo;s higher conscience in an attempt to get more people on the arks.</p><p>So with everything coming down around them, Jackson, Kate, their kids and Gordon head for the Himalayas and a rendezvous with humanity&rsquo;s life rafts.</p><p>If you can believe a fairly average family manages to travel halfway around the globe, then you&rsquo;ll also buy that right up to the very end of the world, cell-phone service will be uninterrupted. No matter where they are, no matter what Armageddon is under way, the characters in this movie can always get a clear signal.</p><p> As drama, &ldquo;2012&rdquo; is pure flapdoodle. As escapist entertainment it&rsquo;s a hoot. Emmerich isn&rsquo;t trying to scare us so much as dazzle us.</p><p> He tosses in humorous bits (Woody Harrelson is probably still picking scenery out of his teeth after his turn as the hairy, crazed host of a conspiracy-themed radio show). He observes all the death and destruction from afar. We don&rsquo;t see any real suffering &hellip; we assume a godlike perspective from which panicked humanity is nothing more than so many millions of insects running around impotently while Mother Nature stomps on their anthill.</p><p> &ldquo;2012&rdquo; is exactly the movie you think it&rsquo;s going to be. No surprises. Still, it&rsquo;s amusing in a sort of nihilistic way. But with a running time over 2 1/2 hours, it takes way too long to get the job done.</p><p><hr class="infobox-hr-separator" /> <div class="infobox"> <strong><span class="infobox-head">&lsquo;2012&rsquo; &#x2605;&#x2605; </span></strong><br /> <strong>Director: </strong>Roland Emmerich