A One Mann’s Movies review of “Don’t Look Up” (2021).

Bob the Movie Man Rating:

I’m a fan of Adam McKay’s caustically satirical movies, with “The Big Short” (2015) and “Vice” (2018) being movies I can watch multiple times. But with “Don’t Look Up” I was really starting to wonder where he was going….

Plot Summary:

Two Michigan-based astronomers – Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) – make a surprising and appalling discovery: that a comet is just 6 months away from a planet-killing impact with Earth. They have to convince President Orlean (Meryl Streep) of the impending doom, but she and her hopeless Chief-of- Staff son Jason (Jonah Hill) seem more concerned with party politics.

Perhaps big business in the form of billionaire businessman Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) can help?

Certification:

US: R. UK: 15.

Talent:

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Rob Morgan, Cate Blanchett, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande, Himesh Patel.

Directed by: Adam McKay.

Written by: Adam McKay (from a story by David Sirota)

The seat of power, if not competence. Jonah Hill, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence. (Source: Netflix).

Don’t Look Up Review:

Positives:

  • I’m used to Adam McKay picking a target for his satire (e.g. Dick Cheney; the US mortgage market) and then going for them. But this is different: a work of fiction similar to “Armageddon” and (my personal favourite) “Deep Impact”. This confused me. It came as a dawning realisation (and a very positive one) that his target here was the whole of modern-day America. And the parody is just brilliant.
    • You can fully see Meryl Streep’s vainglorious president being Trump under similar circumstances (an appalling thought!). The whole “Don’t Look Up” campaign, complete with the baseball caps, is superb;
    • Mark Rylance is wickedly funny as a bizarre cross between Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. At one point he goes full Goldmember on you!
    • Social media and the desire for “likes” is viciously lampooned.
    • And the whole relationship between scientists, the public, big business and conspiracy theorists has never been brought into sharper relief in these Covid times.
  • The stellar cast all give it their all (although I personally didn’t think that DiCaprio is quite as adept at this type of comedy as the other cast members).

Negatives:

  • Tonally, the film is a bit all over the place at times.
  • I personally don’t find Jonah Hill to be very funny. I found some of his contributions distracting and a bit juvenile compared with the general cutting-edge black comedy. But that might just be a personal view.

Monkeys?

There are two excellent monkeys at the end of the film. The mid-credits one is particularly funny, delivering the pay-off on a joke set up much earlier in the film. There’s also a short post-credits scene involving Jonah Hill.

Summary Thoughts on “Don’t Look Up”

A really interesting film, that I must watch again, now I know where it’s going. But, like me, I think a lot of people will struggle to see the joke. For example, I saw one comment from another online critic saying “It’s not as good as Armageddon”. That kind of misses the point by a couple of hundred parsecs!

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Ken Barnes
2 years ago

This whole film looks to be smug and unfunny. Jonah Hill is tiresome.

Trailer for “Don’t Look Up”

The trailer is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL9aJcqrtnw .

By bobwp

Dr Bob Mann lives in Hampshire in the UK. Now retired from his job as an IT professional, he is owner of One Mann's Movies and an enthusiastic reviewer of movies as "Bob the Movie Man". Bob is also a regular film reviewer on BBC Radio Solent.

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Ken Barnes
2 years ago

This whole film looks to be smug and unfunny. Jonah Hill is tiresome.

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