Scott Mendelson's Open Salon Blog

Forget Bella. 5 Terrible role models in guy-centric hits.

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:11:01 -0500

As I've written before, whenever any movie not primarily involving white males and/or geek-friendly genres becomes a big hit, the moralizers come out in full force about how dangerous or unhealthy said movie is for the target demo in question. Sex and the City: The Movie presents adult women in a terribly materialistic light so it's just unhealthy. And Precious isn't just about one person in a singular situation. Oh no, Precious is about each and every person who happens to be black, poor, female, or overweight, so it's obviously perpetuating one stereotype or another. And we can't have movies starring black people (Obsessed) that are just as sleazy, trashy, and stupid as the kind of thing that white people take for granted, because we can't present black characters, especially black women, in such an unfashionable light.

Needless to say, this is the kind of thing that the Twilight series has had to deal with. Because the lead of the books (and movies) is a teenage girl, she's been held up or brought down on her ability to be a positive role model for girls everywhere. And since she doesn't always make the healthiest choices possible, she's been condemned as a dangerous role model for young girls, which has been used as a weapon to condemn the series beyond the normal realm of 'are the movies any good?'. Well, I wholeheartedly agree with the naysayers. Bella (played by Kristen Stewart in the films) is a terrible role model for young girls. She constantly needs to be rescued, while being told that she is a danger to herself and others. She falls head over heels with a cold and aloof stranger who keeps her at a distance and constantly warns her that her feminine wiles could cause him to hurt her. She is willing to sacrifice her safety and her family's safety to be with him. Then, when he breaks up with her, she basically becomes suicidal and goes through a physical reaction resembling heroin withdrawal. So yes, Bella is a crappy role model. But, let's take a minute to run down some lead characters in male-driven franchises that also fit the bill. After all, if we're so upset that girls are being represented in a bad light, then should we not be as concerned about the boys? And can I, as a responsible citizen, enjoy these male-dominated blockbusters even though the lead character is a poor example to set for young men everywhere? Oh dear, the conflict!

Tony Stark (Iron Man)
Played by Robert Downey Jr, Tony Stark starts the movie as a greedy, ammoral, self-centered arms dealer who cares not one wit about the destruction and death that his product causes. He uses his friends and co-workers, keeps everyone at a distance, and profits off global strife. After creating a perpetually-rechargeable energy source that basically keeps his own heart beating, what does he do? Does he mass-produce this device and revolutionize the entire energy structure of the planet, causing an end to oil-based wars, planet-wide strife, and climate catastrophe? Nope, he uses it as the main energy source for his own personal play suit, which he builds with the intent to... well, he's not really sure. Sure, he eventually uses this 'iron man' suit to avenge his own kidnapping (which, to be fair, saves countless lives) and take down the corrupt leadership of his own company. But before those circumstances force his hand, Stark doesn't seem to want to use his world-changing technology for anything other than his own selfish whims. What a tool...

Sam Witwicky (Transformers)
While Sam, played by Shia LeBeouf, is generally a decent if obnoxious motor-mouthed teen, he does get one moment of shining douchebaggery. After spending the first 2/3 of the film attempting to win the heart (or other part) of his high-school crush, Sam is shocked... SHOCKED to learn that blue-collar Mikaela (Megan Fox) has a troubled past, mainly that her father is doing time for auto theft. Despite the fact that Sam knew nothing about this girl other than that she was hot, and despite the fact that it was her father and not her who was the primary guilty party, he is furious with her and rudely blows her off for several scenes afterward, until SHE has to apologize to HIM for her father's criminal history. She deserves better and should have dumped his nerdy butt on the spot.

James T. Kirk (Star Trek)
Played by Chris Pine in the JJ Abrams revamp, the legendary starship captain is rebooted as a selfish, obnoxious, entitled prick of a man who feels that he should get whatever he wants because he has daddy issues and comes from famous lineage (sound familiar?). He cheats purely out of spite, uses and harasses his female colleagues, and takes command of the starship from his more logical, intelligent, and principled superior via a virtual coup d'état. (wait a minute...) Sure he saves the day in the end, but it's mainly because the future version of his would-be rival shows up and tells him what to do every step of the way. This new James T Kirk is a schmuck. Jean-Luc never would have tolerated this arrogant little mouth-breather playing captain on his ship.

Captain Jack Sparrow (Pirates of the Caribbean 1, 2, and 3)
Sure, he's a delightfully funny cad, played with charm and off-the-wall whimsy by Johnny Depp. But, at the end of the day, he's a pirate. Pirates steal stuff. Pirates rape women and girls. Pirates kill people. Besides, even if we buy that he was a less-evil pirate, his actions in the second and third film belay a nonstop odyssey of treachery, betrayal, and selfish cruelty to the very people who helped win his freedom at the conclusion of the first film. He may not be the worst of the pirates (although even the villainous Barbossa is a 'good guy' in the third film), but he's still a dirty, rotten little scoundrel.

Jedi (Phantom Menace/Attack of the Clones/Revenge of the Sith)
As a staunch defender of the prequels, I must admit that the Jedi are all complete and total imbeciles. The biggest shock of the new prequels was that the legendary Jedi turned out to be a group of pompous, pretentious, self-defeating, useless idiots who couldn't smell a galaxy-threatening conspiracy that was hatching right underneath their noses. They are also mean and petty. Yoda initially refuses to teach Anakin Skywalker because young Skywalker has the gall to miss his mother. Thirteen-years later, when Anakin tries to confide in Yoda that he fears for the life of his wife and unborn child, Yoda's advice is basically 'people die, shit happens, be one with the Force'. Oh, and Anakin himself? Mitigating circumstances aside, he's still a hotheaded, irrational nutcase who actually has at least one genocidal mass murder under his belt before he even turns to the Dark Side. I repeat, Anakin Skywalker, pre-Dark Side, is already a mass murderer.

Obi-Wan resents having to train this young boy who he doesn't entirely trust, and treats him with condescending scorn during his initial apprenticeship. He also cock-blocks Anakin's pursuit of Padme at every opportunity. Even in the final months before the Jedi are wiped out, he can clearly see that his friend and colleague is in pain and torment. Does he ask him to talk about it? Does he put his arm around Anakin and offer to grab a drink to discuss the somewhat disturbing machinations of both the Jedi Council and Chancellor Palpatine? Does he seek insight from Padme, the woman that he probably knows is secretly married to his close friend? Nope, he just sits back while Anikan gets corrupted by Palpatine and abused by Mace Windu. Oh right, Mace Windu. Aside from bullying and constantly second-guessing every step in Anikan's journey, he also is singlehandedly responsible for Anikan turning to the Dark Side. Well, even after all the abuse and lack of trust thrust upon Skywalker, Anikan still turns to Mace Windu when he discovers that Palpantine is one of them Sith lords. So Windu repays the favor by putting Anikan in the position of having to either stand back as Windu executes a defeated and (apparently) incapacitated subject, or raise arms against his fellow Jedi. Whatever Anikan's reasons for saving the would-be Emperor, he was absolutely in the moral and legal right to stop Windu from slaughtering his surrendered prisoner. Point being, if Yoda, Windu, or any of the Jedi council hadn't acted like rigid, emotionless fundamentalists and hadn't treated Anikan like a contagious disease from his first day at Jedi school, if Obi-Wan had made even the slightest effort to reach out to his troubled friend, then Anikan would have remained merely a Jedi with a murder rap, rather than the key instrument in a plot to overthrow the Republic. Let's be honest. Jedi are losers and terrible role models for our nation's youth.

So let's lay off poor, madly-in-love Bella for the moment. She may be a terrible role model, but she's hardly alone in the world of blockbusters. Compared to a selfish arms-dealer turned selfish energy-hog and monk warriors who have a habit of slaughtering innocents, a naive, romantic teenage girl looks pretty upstanding. Besides, she's a bra-burning feminist compared to the princess in Enchanted, but that's for another day. What is worth noting is that all of the above male characters are basically users and abusers of their friends, family, and lovers. Yet Bella is being attacked in various circles because she basically allows herself to be abused and used. So the question we really ought to be asking ourselves is why we're so intolerant of female characters who get abused, while so gleefully accepting of male characters who do the abusing?

Scott Mendelson

Open Salon Weekend Box Office In Review (11/22/09)

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:11:14 -0500

If you're a Batman fan or a general guy-centric geek, you're probably thinking "That was close... too close". If you're a Twi-fanatic, you're thinking something along the lines of "We'll get you next time Batman, next time!" (Eclipse comes out June 30th, 2010). Either way, Twilight Saga: New Moon pulled in a massive $142.8 million over its first three days. That's the third-biggest opening weekend of all time, behind Spider-Man 3 ($151 million) and The Dark Knight ($158 million). I discussed the Friday opening in much detail, so I'll try to avoid repetition (which is why I usually don't write posts concerning Friday box office). Let's dive right in...

Midnight - $26.2 million - Best midnight-3am gross.
Friday - $72.7 million - Best Friday ever and best single day ever.
Saturday - $42.2 million - 7th-biggest Saturday (-41% from Friday).
Sunday - $27.8 million - 17th-biggest Sunday (-34% from Saturday)

The Twilight franchise has become the first series to slightly increase its weekend multiplier between the first and second films. Sequels are by nature more highly anticipated and thus more likely to gross a bigger portion of its opening gross on the opening day. Twilight had the second-lowest weekend multiplier (that's total weekend divided by opening day) on record with 1.938x. New Moon actually decreased the multiplier by just a fraction (1.96x). As far as the original-to-sequel increase, New Moon improved upon its predecessors opening weekend by a 2.02 times. So it fits right in between above the Bourne series (there was 193% increase between Bourne Identity and Bourne Supremacy). And you all thought that list was a waste of time? Want some stunning comparisons? In two days, New Moon grossed $115.9 million, surpassing the (then record) $114.8 million three-day weekend for Spider-Man. In three days, New Moon surpassed the five-day opening gross of Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix ($139 million), while coming up just $16 million short of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince's five-day opening ($158 million). It outgrossed Prince Caspian's total $141.6 million domestic gross in three days. And the entire domestic gross of every non-Twilight film that Summit has released since November 2007 (starting with the underrated P2) is just $234 million. Whether that says more about Twilight or Summit Entertainment, I'll leave for you to decide, but New Moon will surpass the entire non-Twilight Summit catalog in the next week or two. Which means, in my personal opinion, Summit either needs to learn how to market non-Twilight product or get themselves sold before this series comes to an end.

Here's another fun statistic... the audience for this huge weekend was 80% female. So, if you looked anything like Robert Pattinson or Taylor Lautner and were willing to tag along at the movies this weekend, there's a pretty healthy chance that you got laid over the last 72 hours. Prurient humor aside, it's kinda refreshing to see a major franchise where the males of objectified more than the females. This opening weekend completely dispels one of the cardinal rules of thumb regarding movies, which is that a strong interest from both genders is necessary for a massive opening weekend and long-term playability. Iron Man opened to $98 million because girls wanted to see it as well as boys. 300 appealed to both sexes while Watchmen floundered because of its (alleged) strict boys appeal. And pretty much every major mega-opening was a stereotypical boy movie that had enough appeal for women to draw them into the theaters as well (conventional wisdom dictates that girls will see boy movies but boys won't sit through girl movies). Well, if you take out that 20% male audience, then you still get $114.1 million, which would still make it the biggest three-day weekend of 2009 and the eighth-biggest of all time. Take that, conventional wisdom. I wish the test case had been Whip It, but oh well.

So where does this leave the movie over the long run? It basically can run the boards for the next month, until the one-two punch of Avatar and Sherlock Holmes at the end of the year. There are only two movies that have opened with over $100 million and failed to reach $300 million. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire brought in $102.6 million on this same weekend in 2005, but ended up settling for a 'mere' $290 million. And X-Men: the Last Stand brought in $102.7 million as part of a $122 million four-day Memorial Day weekend in 2006, but audience discontent and general front-loading caused the movie to only make $234 million. And New Moon has a $40 million head-start and a general lack of demo competition, so it's likely game-set-match for Team Dakota... err Team Edward. Barring unprecedented collapse, New Moon will make it to $300 million. Despite the massively front-loaded weekend, the first film actually stuck around in theaters long enough to nearly make it to the $200 million mark. If it equals the total-gross multiplier of Twilight ($192.7 million/$69.6 million = 2.76), then it will end up with a boffo $394 million. However, it IS a sequel and it may very-well play like a quick-kill blockbuster. But even if it performs like the more frontloaded movies of 2009 (Madea Goes to Jail, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, etc) with around a 2.2x weekend-to-total multiplier, it still ends up with $314 million. Heck, if it surpasses The Jonas Brothers 3D Concert Experience as the most frontloaded movie of all time ($19.1 million divided by $12.5 million opening = 1.528x multiplier), that still nets the vampire sequel $218 million. Of course, that's about as likely to happen as the other extreme of it surpassing Titanic, but I do so enjoy doing the math.

Let's see... I think that about covers it. Oh, it scored $274 million worldwide for the sixth-biggest global debut of all-time (Harry Potter still gets to keep that record for now). So let's move on to the other movies. Second place went to The Blind Side, which in any other weekend would have been huge news. The would be implausible if it weren't true-story involving a rich white family adopting a homeless black teen opened with $34.1 million. So yes, Sandra Bullock, an actress who previous to June of this year never had a single $20 million opening in her life, just scored her second $30 million+ of the year. For whatever reason, Sandra Bullock is a bigger star than she's ever been over the last fifteen years. For the moment, it appears that the next Sandra Bullock is... Sandra Bullock. The Blind Side scored the biggest debut for a sports drama, and it received a rare A+ from Cinemascore. The relatively well-reviewed heart-warmer blanketed ads all over sports networks, using its football hook to draw in sports fans to compliment the (generally) female Sandra Bullock fans. As we all know, Sandra Bullock movies usually have fantastic legs (which usually belies their soft openings), so this could easily make it to $150 million by the start of 2010.

2012 dropped 59.5% in weekend two. The disaster epic grossed $26.4 million for a new domestic total of $108 million. On the plus side, the worldwide total is already $450 million for this $260 million-budgeted tentpoler. Sony's Planet 51 weathered terrible reviews to open with $12.2 million. It allegedly only cost $50 million, so it'll do just fine in the long run. It will actually be more harmful to the Sony Animation brand, as the company was riding high on the commercial and critical success of Cloudy with A Chance of Meatballs ($122 million domestic gross). This is a bit like Billy Dee Williams following up his turn as Harvey Dent in Batman with Secret Agent Double-O Soul. A Christmas Carol took a 45% hit, which means it will really have to gain ground over the long holiday to close out Thanksgiving weekend with $100 million. It currently stands at $79.8 million. I'm running out of superlatives to use when discussing Precious, so I'll keep it brief. The film expanded to 629 screens and snagged an $10.8 million weekend for fifth place. That's still a scorching $17,300 per screen average. I did not know this, but apparently Oprah Winfrey announced the end of her talk-show on an episode that featured Precious star Gabourey Sidibe as a guest. Well-played, Winfrey. The would-be Oscar contender has now amassed $21 million without an end in sight.

That's all the news that's fit to print. Join us next weekend for the extra-long Thanksgiving holiday. Wide releases will be Ninja Assassin (most redundant title of the year?), Old Dogs and The Fantastic Mr. Fox (which is still stuck on four screens until Wednesday). Keep an eye on the Ninja Assassin numbers, as I'm expecting a decent debut as an offshoot of New Moon's opening. If you're one of the $28.5 million worth of dudes who got dragged to New Moon, could there be any more appropriate payback movie than something called Ninja Assassin? Limited release debuts include Disney's The Princess and the Frog (on two screens, both of which are priced much too high per ticket to take the risk associated with bringing my two-year old), Me and Orson Welles (starring Zac Efron), and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (starring tons of people worth seeing), The Road. As in be thankful you're not living in Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic hell.

Scott Mendelson

Super Amazing weekend box office prediction for New Moon!

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:11:37 -0500

Based on my top-secret, patented box office estimation formula, I hereby state that Twilight Saga: New Moon will gross $81 million over its first three days. No... wait, it will actually gross $91 million! It will definitely gross $81 million and/or $91 million! How do I know this? Simple. To quote everyone's favorite fictional Spanish teacher, played by Dr. Ken Jeong, I am a box office genius! If you recall, I did a comparison chart of every single franchise launched in the last ten years. I listed every single one unless I'm forgetting a franchise or two and how their sequels did over opening weekend compared to the initial entries. Go there. Checked it out yet?

Ok, welcome back. You'll notice that the biggest percentage jump for pure Fri-Sun stand-alone opening weekends for the first and second film in a franchise is the Harold and Kumar series. Harold and Kumar Goes To White Castle (the best comedy of the decade and one of the finest films made about race relations, but more on that next month) opened with just $5.4 million in its three-day opening weekend. It's terrible sequel, Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay opened to $14.9 million. That's a jump of 276% between films. On the other hand, the biggest decline in sequel opening weekends over the last ten years was suffered by Hostel 2. Hostel 2 opened to only $8.2 million, or just 42% of what the original Hostel opened with 18 months earlier ($19.5 million).

Ok, so using the awesome power of math (this is the part on Numbers where my floating head starts pointing at random variables and data points on a black screen), I took 2.76 and multiplied it by 0.42. That gives me approximately 1.16. So, it stands that the opening weekend for New Moon will surpass the opening weekend of Twilight by about 16%. Ok, so 1.16 x $69.6 million = $81 million. Or, you can add up all the percentages of the pure Fri-Sun stand-alone weekend increases, which gets you 32.61. Divide that by the 25 films. That gets you 1.3044. Multiply that figure by 69.6 and you get a probable opening weekend gross of $91 million. So there you have it... Twilight Saga: New Moon will officially gross either $81 million or $91 million over its opening weekend. Read it and weep, Nielsen, CinemaScore, and/or Nikki Finke!

Scott Mendelson

Open Salon weekend box office in review (11/15/09)

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 19:11:47 -0500

Roland Emmerich's 2012 almost made back its $260 million budget in just three days. The domestic opening weekend was a whopping $65.2 million and the global total was a mammoth $225 million. This is the seventh-biggest domestic bow ever in November, and just shy of the $67 million that Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow pulled in during the Fri-Sun portion of its four-day Memorial Day weekend launch in 2004. With its $160 million non-domestic weekend gross, it's also the fifth-largest non-US debut of all time and the all-time non-US debut champ for a non-sequel/franchise picture. So the film pulled in a surprisingly potent 2.8x weekend multiplier and actually had a token increase on Saturday from $23 million to $24 million. Point being, this one is playing as a normal grown-up smash hit and should have decent legs until Avatar comes down the pike in just over a month. See, that's what happens when you actually deliver the goods and have the decency to be not all that bad.

Emmerich's sci-fi adventures have always done around 2/3 of their business overseas (only the US-centric The Patriot had about a 50/50 split). Since the film basically delivers what it promises (full-scale worldwide destruction, tear-jerking melodrama, better than expected acting), it will likely be the second-choice of casual moviegoers for the near future. Expect a big drop (-55%) next weekend as Twilight Saga: New Moon attempts to kick sand in 2012's face, but the film will level off over the long Thanksgiving Day weekend. Roland Emmerich is officially one of the most consistently solid big-time money makers in the book. Independence Day and The Patriot aside, I wish his previous movies were better (fifteen years later, Stargate still stinks), but the man can make trailer-ready movies like no one else. Of course, since 2012 is arguably the Love Actually of disaster flicks, I do wonder where he will go from here. From a genre standpoint, you really can't one-up this one, so it will be interesting to see if Emmerich can find comparative success in different genres. Regardless, $225 million worth of people paid to see Chiwetel Ejiofor and Oliver Platt in starring roles, so that's good news for everyone.

Second place went to Robert Zemeckis's A Christmas Carol, which held fast with just a 25.8% drop in weekend two. The film scored $22.3 million and now has a ten-day total of $63.2 million. It actually had an 8% smaller drop than The Polar Express's second weekend, and its ten-day total is still far ahead of the 12-day $51 million gross of The Polar Express (the latter film opened on a Wednesday). It also grossed about $1 million less on its second weekend than the 2004 picture grossed over its initial Fri-Sun debut. This one should cross $100 million right before the start of the Thanksgiving holiday and will try to reach Polar Express's $162 million total before Avatar steals away its 3D and IMAX screens on December 17th at 12:01am. It will still be an uphill battle to match the $200 million production cost, but the film isn't going to go down without a fight. I'll get to third place in a moment, but fourth place went to The Men Who Stare At Goats, which plunged 51% for a $6.2 million second-weekend. Still, the $5 million acquisition has already grossed $23 million for Overture films, so everything from here on in is pure gravy.

Third place went to this month's unstoppable juggernaut. Last month, Paranormal Activity burst into the top-five on just 169 screens, scoring $7.9 million for a $49,000 per screen average (by the way, congratulations on crossing the $100 million mark on Friday). This month, it's all about Precious. The Lionsgate acquisition grossed $104,000 per screen in 18 theaters last weekend. This weekend it expanded into 174 screens and had to settle for a sad, sorry $33,762 per screen average. At $5.8 million, the critically-acclaimed drama had the second-biggest weekend total for an under 200 screen release (behind you know who). The $10 million picture has now grossed $8.7 million, and it's just getting started. The film is all but guaranteed to receive several major Oscar nominations, and it will go wider next weekend. Precious has become the queen of buzz, with everyone and their brother adding their two-cents in about the film's quality and its alleged racial, gender, and class politics. I think much of the debate is silly, as the movie never pretends to be about every single person who's life resembles the lead character. Any popular movie that isn't about white men or nerd-friendly characters seems to get attacked as being offensive or stereotypical to someone somewhere. But as long as pundits as wringing their hands one way or another, then people will be inclined to check out what all of the fuss is about. Ironically, while Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry did nothing more than procure the film for Lionsgate and put their publicity machines behind it (no small worth), this very well may be the first Tyler Perry-related film to reach $100 million.

Fifth place went to the Michael Jackson documentary This Is It, which at $67.1 million is now the highest-grossing concert film of all time. It also crossed the $200 million mark in global receipts, so all in all a good weekend for something that everyone (including myself) assumed was a one-weekend wonder. Couples Retreat also crossed the $100 million domestic gross mark, so yay for all involved (nice poster, nitwits). The Box dropped 58% and The Fourth Kind dropped 62%, owing mainly to the fact that no one liked either of those films. The only other new opener, Pirate Radio, debuted with just $2.9 million on 882 screens. The Fantastic Mr. Fox debuted on four screens and grossed $265,900 (about $66,475 per screen). The critically-acclaimed Woody Harrelson/Ben Foster war drama The Messenger also debuted on four screens, grossing $11,131 per.

That's all the news that's fit to print. Join us next weekend when the major new releases are the Sandra Bullock drama The Blind Side (a 'you wouldn't believe it if it wasn't a true story' movie) and the animated Planet 51 (basically The Battle For Terra, with more comedy and less genocide). The limited releases are John Woo's Red Cliff and Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Am I forgetting anything? Oh, right, we get to see if Twilight Saga: New Moon grosses $70 million in its first weekend or in its first day and a half. For more box office, movie reviews, trailer reviews, news commentary, and original essays, go to Mendelson's Memos.

Scott Mendelson

Open Salon review: 2012 (2009)

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:11:07 -0500

2012
2009
158 minutes
Rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

Shock of shocks, Roland Emmerich's 2012 is actually a relatively satisfying genre picture. It avoids the over reliance on family melodrama and romantic entanglements that plagued The Day After Tomorrow. Unlike that global warming epic, this new entry actually delivers on the big-bucks carnage, as the last two hours have a pretty steady flow of destruction, epic death, and near-misses. But most importantly, by filling the cast with stalwart character actors and letting them actually act more often than not, Emmerich has created best-cast and most cheekily entertaining disaster film since the The Core. The film snob in you may feel guilty in the morning, but 2012 is a better film that any of us could have expected.

Dragged by my disaster-loving wife (she loves Air Emergency, Surviving Disaster, and the like), I went into 2012 expecting the worst. Roland Emmerich hadn't made a good movie since 2000, and his batting average was a pathetic 2/7 thus far (Independence Day and The Patriot being his lone winners). But the thing actually works. The key is that they spent so much money on special effects that they couldn't hire 'stars'. So instead we have a 2.5 hour disaster movie fronted by Chiwetel Ejiofor (acting god), Oliver Platt (character acting god), and Thandie Newton (a vastly untapped resource). Woody Harrelson has great fun as an accurate doomsayer, and Danny Glover wears his Shooter dentures as the President (dig how he says 'catastrophe' during his speech to humanity). Yes we have John Cusack and his ultra-wholesome family (the Curtis clan) that must be reunited, but they weren't nearly as front and center or as syrupy as feared. Oddly enough, this $260 million mega-disaster epic works best as an acting treat. We couldn't care less about the fate of the Curtis family, but we darn well care about the battle of wills between Ejiotor's occasionally naive idealist and Platt's not-always-wrong realist. There is also surprisingly solid work from such pros as Blu Mankuma, George Segal, and Stephen McHattie (he and Lance Henriksen really need to make a movie together).

The film's biggest fault, ironically, is in its unending disaster scenes. While they are copious and technically impressive, too many of them are burdened with the false suspense of watching our archetypical nuclear family escape yet another round of peril. On one hand, we can ignore the characters in peril and sit back and watch the carnage. But, on the other hand, the film has a disturbing undercurrent, where we are supposed to care more about that the Curtis family survived that flood or earthquake than about the billions who did not. I've always said that the key to Titanic was that Cameron made you feel for every other person on that ship who lost their lives, rather than making Jack and Rose the only victims that mattered. 2012 tries to acknowledge the death of an entire planet, but too many of the disaster scenes are more about thrilling escapes than tragic annihilation. Owing to the PG-13 rating and the family-friendly target, there is a near lack of aftermath to any of the devastation. There are probably fewer onscreen dead bodies than in the equally bloodless Cloverfield.

Still, there is a minimum of melodrama, and the movie is meaner about life and death that you'd expect (one much-hyped farewell moment doesn't go as planned). It's not art, and there is too much unnecessary humor. During the climax, are we really supposed to cheer the revenge of a spurned woman, knowing that a man and his two young sons have been condemned to death? But it's a surprisingly solid popcorn B-movie that works as big-screen entertainment. The movie gets more juice out of its Ejiofor/Platt verbal duels (Ejiofor isn't always right and Platt isn't just an unfeeling evil bureaucrat) than it does out of its end of the world CGI. Despite the 158-minute running time, the film only drags at the very end, where it reaches its natural conclusion at the two-hour mark but still unloads one more unnecessary emergency to drag out the finale. For much of the running time, the film is almost leisurely, and it's an oddly relaxing experience. Yes, the film kinda more or less avoids dealing with the whole 'everyone on earth is going to die' plot thread, but we've got Deep Impact for that.

Grade: B