Don’t Look Up – Film Review

Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), an astronomy grad student, and her professor Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) make an astounding discovery of a comet orbiting within the solar system. The problem: it’s on a direct collision course with Earth. The other problem? No one really seems to care. Turns out warning mankind about a planet-killer the size of Mount Everest is an inconvenient fact to navigate.

With the help of Dr. Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), Kate and Randall embark on a media tour that takes them from the office of an indifferent President Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her sycophantic son and Chief of Staff, Jason (Jonah Hill), to the airwaves of The Daily Rip, an upbeat morning show hosted by Brie (Cate Blanchett) and Jack (Tyler Perry). With only six months until the comet makes impact, managing the 24-hour news cycle and gaining the attention of the social media-obsessed public before it’s too late proves shockingly comical — what will it take to get the world to just look up?!

As soon as Adam McKay‘s Don’t Look Up begins, you’ll certainly be feeling something. Instantaneously, I felt as though I were watching an extremely high-budget skit from an episode of Saturday Night Live. That may sound quite worrisome, but honestly, I really enjoy a good SNL skit. However, when it’s stretched to over two hours and not much happens throughout that time, it can become one of the most tedious films of the entire year, which Don’t Look Up certainly is.

For a movie that focuses every single scene on Leonardo DiCaprio’s Randall and Jennifer Lawrence’s Kate trying so desperately to convince the world that a comet is coming to destroy Earth and humankind as we know it, the film does an incredibly poor job at making us care, because it presents us with a handful of characters that are simply so annoying and insufferably unlikable that we spend the entirety of the running time secretly hoping that everybody does die at the end.

McKay’s films are usually right up my alley. One of my favorite films of 2015 was The Big Short, which saw McKay tackle finance problems in ways that took me by complete surprise. It was a riveting yet also hilarious film that truly had something to say and it said it well. But Don’t Look Up spends more than two hours frantically trying to say something clever and important and yet it fails tremendously due to an incredibly under-developed script, and one that is far too cheesy and cringe-worthy to take seriously. There was truly never a moment in Don’t Look Up where I felt any sense of tension, and that’s not good for a movie about a comet that’s coming to destroy the world.

The final fifteen minutes, on the other hand, were actually incredibly strong and I was finally interested in what was going on. But, obviously, that’s too little too late. Why was that final stretch so good while the rest of the movie was so boring? It’s a mystery I’ll never be able to solve. Another big mystery here is why so many A-list actors wanted to be in this. Seriously – this is probably the most star-studded film since Rian Johnson‘s Knives Out. Heck, I’d argue that it’s even more star-studded than that film.

DiCaprio delivers a strong performance as Randall Mindy alongside the always terrific and always interesting Jennifer Lawrence, who portrays Kate Dibiasky. But, sadly, the rest of the cast gets criminally underused. Jonah Hill is reduced to the role of some snarky chief of staff while Timothée Chalamet plays the cliche annoying boyfriend character. And what’s up with Ron Perlman getting such little screen time?

Ariana Grande also shines in the limited screen-time she was given, proving that, although she is a pop-star first and foremost, she can most certainly act if she is given the right script. The actors are not the problem with Don’t Look Up at all. The problem is the absurdly boring script that consistently struggles to be engaging, and instead, saving the best for last.