Count on Roland Emmerich, the Master of Disaster, to base an entire film on the (false) pretense that the ancient Mayan calender predicts Earth’s demise in three years, and then scarcely mention the source of the ensuing pandemonium.  Less than a handful of sentences are spent on the pop-culture rumor oft-repeated about the so-called predictions of the highly sophisticated mathematicians and astronomers of the ancient Americas.  That glaring omission would be a deal-breaker for any other film.  But in “2012,” that’s not really the point.  Emmerich even admits that the project was well into development when screenwriter, Harald Kloser, suggested that they throw in the Mayan angle.  That tidbit of superstition and pseudo-science that was billed as the narrative’s backbone is nothing more than an excuse to unleash the most self-indulgent, meretricious, laughably melodramatic, unyieldingly cataclysmic imagery in the history of film.

John Cusack plays struggling writer, Jackson Curtis, who, since only selling 400 copies of his book, makes ends meet escorting high-profile, pompous foreigners to and from the airport in a limousine.  Amanda Peet plays his ex-wife, Kate Curtis, who’s about as hollow as characters get.  And her new squeeze is the cliched, dorky stand-in dad, Gordon Silberman, played by Tom McCarthy.  This love triangle is wrought with the usual fabricated tension and handled with clinical indifference.

The movie opens in 2009 and hurls towards the ominous 2012 within the first 15 minutes.  Jackson and his estranged family are thrust back together and forced to outrun/out-drive/out-fly the solar flares, or whatever they are, that the Mayans knew would be aiming to take out all of civilization as soon as all the planets align.  They do a lot of screaming, dodging explosions, and running from giant nefarious-looking dark clouds that look like The Nothing from “The Never Ending Story.”  They eventually encounter the US military that conveniently has several massive high-tech boats cleverly stored next to Mount Everest full of animals to propagate their respective species a la Noah’s Ark.

“2012″ is Emmerich’s “Goodfellas.”  Wait, hear me out on this one.  A lifetime of toiling in the abyss of the human psyche and the darkest recesses of murderous mafia networks finally led to Martin Scorsese’s fully-realized, near-perfect 1990 crime-drama masterpiece.  A lifetime of fascination with, thinking about, and filming things getting blowed up real good has finally led to Emmerich’s granddaddy of calamity, a fully-realized exercise in shameless, utterly inane destruction.  Look out Michael Bay, your movies may be poorly directed, racially insensitive, misogynistic, and instrumental in the mass de-evolution of society, but when it comes to senseless annihilation, you may have met your match.