Monday, February 14, 2022

DEFCON 2012 (2010) NO STARS

Well, there’s nothing like a global pandemic to make you wistful for the end of the world hysteria surrounding 2012.  Remember the good old days when the Mayan calendar foretold we were all gonna croak?  Memories.  Anyway, all the nostalgia in the world ain’t going to salvage this horrible mess.  

The first twenty minutes of this movie (if it can even be called that) feels like a bunch of different scenes, ideas, and leftover video game footage that was cut up with a hacksaw and fed into an UNO Attack game.  Then, the UNO Attack spit the footage all across the room where it was then edited together by a chimpanzee with ADHD.  

A guy finds a DVD that purports to be a documentary of how the world will end in 2012.  Then, we inexplicably jump thousands of years into the future where we see a bunch of spaceship special effects that look like they came out of a PC game from the ‘90s.  After that, we focus on a bunch of scavengers shuffling through the ruins of Earth, which is to say a bunch of guys in Laser Tag uniforms stumbling around an abandoned mall.  Eventually, they meet another group of survivors who can speak telepathically, which is good for the actors because they don’t have to remember their lines, but bad for the audience since they have to listen to the echo-y dialogue that is dubbed over the (non) action.  This dialogue competes with an already overcrowded soundtrack that is filled with constant narration by the alleged hero, which is stupefyingly abrasive.  After every two or three sentences, he quips, “Like I give a shit.”  Buddy, if you don’t give a shit, how do you expect the audience to?

It feels to me like the filmmakers couldn’t sell this piece of crap if their souls depended on it.  So, what they did was slap bookending segments that were tenuously related to the imminent 2012 apocalypse and put 2012 in the title.  That alone was probably enough to get a distributor in 2010, when the world was still curious about the possible destruction of the human race.  If they had made it in 2022, I’m sure they would’ve had to put a COVID plotline in the beginning and called it Defcon COVID-19 in order to secure distribution.    

A few weeks back, I declared The Nasty Rabbit the worst movie I had ever seen.  At least that flick had the benefit of Arch Hall, Jr.  Defcon 2012 can’t even boast that dubious distinction.  What I’m getting at here is that I kinda wished the world ended back in 2012 so I didn’t have to sit through this garbage.

AKA:  Worldend 2012.  AKA:  2012:  Armageddon.

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