Squandering the starriest cast of the year
Don’t Look Up
15 cert, 145 min ★★★★★
Dir Adam Mckay Starring Leonardo Dicaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ariana Grande, Melanie Lynskey, Ron Perlman, Scott Mescudi, Himesh Patel, Chris Evans
Watching Don’t Look Up flaunt then squander the starriest cast of the year is a deflating experience – all the more so because this sledgehammer satire on planetary apocalypse comes on so strong. It packs all its best ideas, funniest scenes and most inspired moments of acting purely into the first 45 minutes, and then lets the rest – another 95, I’m afraid – drain slowly down the plughole.
Adam Mckay (Vice, The Big Short) puts America’s idiocy around climate change in his sights here, with a metaphor you’d think couldn’t miss: what if scientists knew there was an asteroid hurtling towards Earth, but everyone was too concerned about the bummer factor to react?
We begin in a lab with two nobody astronomers, Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo Dicaprio) and Dr Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), who are briefly euphoric to have identified a brand new planetary body. Alas, immediate calculations wipe their smiles off: probability is 99.7 per cent that Comet Dibiasky, as they name it, is set on a collision course with us. At 5-10km wide, it’s hefty enough to cause an extinction-level event.
Randall, played by a switched-on Dicaprio with an anxiety disorder eating him up, and Dibiasky – Lawrence at her don’t-come-near-me stoniest – must be the messengers of this doom, along with a reliably good Rob Morgan as the administration’s one sensible science advisor.
No one else is ready to receive the news with anything but self-serving shrugs, from the obtuse US president, Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep), to her prattish chief of staff son (Jonah Hill) and the co-anchors of a chirpy morning show (Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry). Couldn’t that 99.7 per cent be massaged, tries Orlean, and a more palatable 70 per cent fed to the public? Meanwhile, as overnight TV celebrities, the experts are asked to “keep it light” and get trolled instantly by fatuous internet memes.
Mckay and his actors push some spark into this early stuff as Mindy/ Dibiasky play waiting games in the White House; Hill plays his ghastly brat like the worst person you can imagine in Veep, and Blanchett’s every cuddly grimace and mechanical smirk, as a shiny-faced network bombshell, make her scenes tingle with promise. The trouble is having to get to know them any better. A ranting Ron Perlman isn’t much fun as a gung-ho colonel sent to obliterate the offending rock on a suicide mission.
It takes some effort to make Streep look this stumped, and Mark Rylance so actively bad, as a malign variation on the billionaire-tech-nerd-visionary he sketched in Ready Player One. White-haired and squeaky-voiced, his Peter Isherwell, a massive campaign donor for Orlean, gets the rocket mission aborted after twigging he could mine the comet for rare minerals first. The character comes off like a
Saturday Night Live skit on Elon Musk that in fact would only boost his crypto portfolio.
Don’t Look Up’s driving thesis – roughly, “look at all these morons!” – is so basic it’s only really possible to respond to it as a hit-and-miss actors’ showcase. Timothée Chalamet at least commits to his odd role as a stoner anarchist who hits on Lawrence, and the always-wonderful Melanie Lynskey (as Dicaprio’s bewildered wife) supplies a warmth which helps the whole thing recover at the end.
Like Tim Burton’s take on imperilled Americans in the similarly starstudded Mars Attacks!, Mckay’s film winds up having to sort the wheat rather urgently from the chaff – it needs to ask itself who, among this parade of maniacs, is even worth keeping when extinction looms. A handful of sturdy performers do make the cut, but it doesn’t bode well when you often wish the comet itself would get a wriggle on.
In cinemas now, and on Netflix from Christmas Eve