SPOILER ALERT: There may be some implied spoilers below, but nothing too specific that you wouldn't expect from a film about the end of the world.
First off, it's always easier to rip on a film than to critically explain the positive things about it. 2012 looks great. The special effects are over the top. There were not any instances where I thought "wow that's just horrible CG". Considering that Roland Emmerich has been held to tight budgets before, I would hazard to guess he at least was not held back by money. And so I suppose that eliminates one of the excuses he could use for delivering a paper-thin 2 hour and 40 minute chase scene where fireballs chased a car, chunks of earth chased a motorhome, chunks of skyscrapers chased a plane, and tsunamis chased boats.
You know that when you go to see an epic action film, you don't expect to see much in the way of character development and, in this regard, the film didn't disappoint. John Cusack plays John Cusack. I've seen characters with more depth in an episode of Pigs in Space.
Here's the basic flaw with 2012. Right from the first teaser trailer I saw for this film, it seemed they were targeting this film to being somewhat ominous in addition to being an action film. For this ominous tone to work, one would have to at least be able to suspend disbelief for a long period of time as the plot was building before some of the craziness (that was bound to occur) could simply be glazed over as part of the roller coaster ride.
When I went to see Live Free or Die Hard, otherwise known as Die Hard 4: The Revenge of the Sequel, I was able to suspend my disbelief until the point that John McClane leapt from a collapsing highway overpass on the wing of a hover fighter jet. Call me a sucker, but everything to that point met my threshold limits; overpass to plane - not so much. In the case of 2012, that threshold was breached in the first 20 minutes and from that point on the so-called ominous end-of-the-world tone that the film tried to convey was lost in the chase scene after chase scene romp that stretched for a near 3 hours.
This is NOT a horrible film. This is, however, a film that had too many billions of people dying to be a fun action film and too much action and knowing glances with one-liners to be thought-provoking. I swear at one point that Danny Glover wanted to say that he only had three days left until retirement.
To allow an end-of-the-world concept to be realized as a dark subject on film, more drama and real acting needed to be injected. While I can often suspend my belief at the circumstance of the apocalypse, I shouldn't be thinking - wow, that line was telegraphed. In summing up the inability of Emmerich to create atmosphere: billions of people died, and I really didn't care. And, at the end of the film, three weeks after this apocalypse, many of the characters didn't seem to care too much either.
Maybe I just expected to see Cusack and Amanda Peet in a cliched romantic comedy about two mid-life divorcees and how their opposites attract relationship ends up in a Shakespearean wedding ending. Maybe I expected Oliver Platt to be something other than Oliver Platt. Maybe I expected Chiwetel Ejiofor to... well I didn't expect him to do much, because frankly, until I refreshed my memory on imdb.com when I got home, I wasn't sure where I'd seen him before; turns out in a whole bunch of things - his character was definitely the best of the lot.
I know that my final word on 2012 will sound really damning, though to me it's not as bad as you'd think. If you liked Armageddon, Day After Tomorrow, and Brendan Fraser's turn in Journey to the Center of the Earth, you'll probably like this... I kinda liked Armageddon - it crossed the line of being a romp without reservation and never looked back. The chase scenes were more akin to the Blues Brothers instead of Bullitt. 2012 had too much action to be taken seriously... at least no fruit carts were harmed in the chase of this movie, and I didn't have to put on 3D glasses to watch it.
I am anxiously waiting for James Cameron's Avatar to disappoint me further.
To quote T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men:
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.