I know what I have against Roland Emmerich The Patriot, for starters but what does he have against us? He's bombarded Earth with alien death rays, big-footed it with a rampaging reptile and put it into deep freeze. Now in 2012, his latest apocalyptic folly, he cracks the planet like a nut, splitting its crust, toppling its mountains and cities, and laying its every creeping thing to inevitable tedious waste.

Maybe he's angry. (His last movie, 10,000 B.C., was widely panned.) To judge from the similarity with which he stages the multiple disaster sequences in 2012 a limo, a camper, a plane, a bigger plane and some really big boats, by turns, race ahead of the impending doom he seems exhausted. It's no wonder. Finding newish ways to cram large-scale carnage into a PG-13 package is tricky. You need enough verisimilitude to hook the audience, but not enough to freak it out: the collapsing high-rises have to look real enough to be plausible, as do the itty-bitty computer-generated figures falling from them. Swirling dust and flying debris serve that commercial purpose, not rivers of blood and body pulp.

And so the dust swirls in 2012, and debris and bodies fly, though at a careful distance. It all looks fairly convincing and also familiar: if you don't repeatedly flash on Sept. 11, Mr. Emmerich will surely be disappointed. That gives a cheap frisson, though the larger shivers are supplied by the onslaught of pricey special effects, which have grown predictably snazzier since his last cataclysm. Alas, the clichés of the disaster narrative remain in place. To that ruinous end, the larger catastrophe in 2012 functions as both the trigger and backdrop for a about a fractured family, standing in for the rest of humanity, which heals as the world falls apart. That's the idea, anyway.

In truth, the central family here is as disposable as the billions of computer-generated humans that soon pile up after disaster hits. Written by Mr. Emmerich and Harald Kloser (they last collaborated on 10,000 B.C.), 2012 takes its plot points and shifting plates from both science and fiction, and its title from doomsday prophesies, including a myth about the end of days derived from a reading of the Mayan calendar. Though not much is made of the Mayan angle, the most amusing character, a doomsday prophet and radio played by Woody Harrelson, seems in hair, beard and interests to have been drawn along the predictive lines of the real author Daniel Pinchbeck (2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl).

Mr. Harrelson looks like he's actually having the kind of good time should provide but that this one roundly fails to deliver. Despite the frenetic action scenes, the movie sags, done in by multiple story lines that undercut one another and by the heaviness of its conceit. Humanity is dying, after all, as the television talking heads keep repeating, and while most of the dead are specks on the screen, Mr. Emmerich occasionally brings you close to the calamity. In one scene a musician (George Segal) calls his estranged son, but the phone is answered by the granddaughter he's never seen. She's cute, but then her house shakes and she's gone, vaporized so that a sob can catch in Mr. Segal's throat and ours.

There's no time for real tears in movies of this sort, of course, though there's plenty of space available for synergistic product placement, as evidenced by the Sony Vaio equipment that fills the government offices where the American president (Danny Glover) stoically stands by. Closer to the ground, another patriarch (John Cusack) plays his part as a divorced dad who will be enlisted for the usual heroics, while Amanda Peet rolls her eyes as his embittered ex. Depending on your tolerance for Mr. Cusack's mugging, she has traded up or down by landing a plastic surgeon (Tom McCarthy). Completing this are two irritating children, a preadolescent boy (Liam James) and a younger girl (Morgan Lily).

Chiwetel Ejiofor, as some sort of wizard scientist, gets the chance to say My. God. several times in a credible American accent while the less-fortunate Oliver Platt plays a sleazy politician who's equal parts devil and ham. Thandie Newton shows up as the president's daughter who, because movies like these subscribe to the Noah's ark theory of onscreen hookups (two of every kind), becomes an eventual romantic foil for Mr. Ejiofor's character. Somewhere in the Himalayas a young Tibetan monk (Osric Chau) ponders the mysteries of life as his brother ( Han) heads off on a secret mission in China where salvation waits onscreen and, presumably, in that country's contribution to the movie's global box-office take.


In I Love You, Man, which is by far the best Judd Apatow comedy that Judd Apatow had nothing at all to do with, Paul Rudd gives a startlingly funny and original performance as a nice guy with serious dweebish tendencies, and the delight of what Rudd does here comes down to how exquisitely embarrassing he is to watch. He makes you wince in hilarity. Rudd, in films like Role Models and Wet Hot American Summer, has been a wiseass par excellence, and maybe it took a wiseass to play a dork with this much merciless understanding. His Peter Klaven is an L.A. real estate agent (he's selling Lou Ferrigno's mansion) who has just gotten engaged, an event that forces him to confront the fact that he has no male friends. Who will be his groomsmen? His best man?

That sounds like a fairly mild predicament to hang a movie on, but the resonant joke of I Love You, Man is that the reason Peter has no pals is that he's too sweetly sincere, too in touch with his sensitive side, to indulge in 
the gloriously insensitive modes of male bonding: the reckless sex chatter and sports talk, the need to be a guy, a dude. Peter meets Sydney (Jason Segel), who seems like natural buddy material, and the two begin to hang out. But the more Peter tries to get down with his masculine self, the more our jaws drop at how bad he is at it. He does agonizingly out-of-date SNL routines as if they signified he was ''in the know,'' he says things like ''me slappa da bass'' in a ''reggae'' accent, and when his new friend nicknames him Pistol, he names him back — and sounds like a complete idiot jackass.

Rudd shows us the awful eagerness to please that drives Peter's strenuous attempt to fit in. He's as mesmerizingly pathetic as Austin Powers, only Peter is a dork you can believe in. The more your face turns red for him, the more you root for him. That's what makes Paul Rudd a star. I Love You, Man is a guy-meets-guy ''romantic'' comedy, and it's part of the film's merry topical wink at how men have been changed by girl-power culture that Peter has no trouble relating to women, but to relate to men he must first figure out how to be one. And he does: by jamming with Sydney to songs by Rush (who they think is the best band in history—talk about masculine delusions!). I Love You, Man is on the side of all things rude, raunchy, and guyish, but only because it recognizes that the freedom to be a lout is a pillar of our civilization. And that more than ever, it's a freedom you have to earn