'2012' (PG-13)(out of four)

If you can forgive the thin script and watch "2012" for its thrill park ride maneuvers of ending the world, your 158 minutes will be well spent. However, it you were hoping for style and substance, this doomsday film will have you pondering your weekly movie choice.

It's difficult, though, to spend more than 2½ hours with characters when you frankly don't care if they make it to their next birthday. John Cusack takes the lead reigns as a failed writer named Jackson Curtis (no one ever calls him, Jack, by the way) turned limousine driver who is struggling to make ends meet and get his kids to accept his new single dad role. His wife, Kate (a deer-in-headlights Amanda Peet) has taken up with a plastic surgeon named, Gordon (Thomas McCarthy), who probably wears his scrubs to bed since he's in them the entire movie.

The film begins in a copper mine in India, in the year 2009, where geologist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) has been beckoned by another geologist who has discovered that solar eclipses are heating the Earth's core. Due to the alignment of planets, it's getting so hot in there that inevitably the world's crust will shift dramatically.

The year flickers by to 2010 where the United States president, played by an earnest Danny Glover, is warning world leaders about the Earth's demise. In a grave voice he announces, "The world as we know it is coming to an end." And so begins dialogue that is as predictable as the sun rising.

An odd subplot about art scholars hiding the Mona Lisa is utterly confusing, and a car crash and reference to the same Paris tunnel where Princess Diana met her demise, is pointless.

All of this uninspiring set up is never ending, and finally when California begins to crack, it's a bit of relief.

Director Roland Emmerich, who is no stranger to CGI destruction ("Independence Day" and "The Day After Tomorrow") borrows again from his spectacular toolbox and goes over the top in "2012."

Emmerich has a field day smashing up the world, and taking familiar landmarks and either turning them to rubble or drowning them with a tsunami.

Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro topples, as does the Washington Monument. The White House drowns as the USS John F. Kennedy storms it, and so on and so forth. In a blatant show of irony, Emmerich splits the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in two in the middle of Michelangelo's the Creation of Adam.

As all this hell is breaking loose, Curtis is piecing together clues given to him at Yellowstone by a hippy talk-show host named Curtis Frost. Woody Harrelson as Frost is actually the sole cast member in this movie that gives you a reason to care about the apocalypse.

If this really was the end of the world, and the only person who knew the secret to man's survival was a stoner broadcasting out of a hippy van, now that would make for a good movie.