How much can one family endure?

Quite a lot if you're using "2012" as a benchmark.

After learning that the earth's crust is crumbling, John Cusack gathers up his children, his ex-wife, her husband and various others and makes like a bat out of hell.

The flight is pretty impressive -- for the first hour -- then the disaster drill wears thin and you just wish director Roland Emmerich would cut to the chase.

He doesn't -- particularly since he's keen on making statements about the Cold War, the Bible and retribution. Overkill -- a "2012" byword -- fuels the film more than anything. "Titanic," "The Poseidon Adventure" and "The Towering Inferno" are mere pikers in this film's wake.

And they didn't need to be. Unlike James Cameron, Irwin Allen and others, Emmerich didn't realize more was less. In order to get all the special effects in, he has to ditch buckets of plot. As a result, we get a highlight reel of characters' lives, not a close examination.

Cusack plays a failed writer who drives a limo to make ends meet. He wants to spend more time with his children, but they're caught up in a world that's headed by the "new dad," a plastic surgeon. Meanwhile, his boss has bought his way onto an ark that will save people in case of such a cataclysm. That means there's hope (at least for him) and a way out for Cusack.

Starting with an earthquake, Emmerich quickly makes his way to a burning building, a racing limo, a soaring plane, a sinking ship and a troubled cruiser. In short, he plows through "Earthquake," "The Towering Inferno," "Speed," "Die Hard," "Titanic" and "The Poseidon Adventure."

There's a little "Perfect Storm" and a dash of "Jurassic Park" here and there, but the goal isn't to honor those films, just one-up them.

Cusack is fine, Amanda Peet is better than you'd expect and Oliver Platt is appropriately evil as the president's chief of staff. Emmerich puts Danny Glover in the White House and makes sly references to folks like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Barack Obama.

"2012," though, isn't apocalypse now. It's simply a test of technology.

Emmerich makes the journey exciting -- imagine flying between two tumbling buildings -- but can't find his film's heart. It's so buried in weapons of mass destruction you can barely hear it beat.

Rated PG-13, "2012" features violence and adult situations.

On a scale of four stars, "2012" gets:

2 1/2 stars