Skip it. It kills me to say that, as this was one of the films I was looking the most forward to this summer, but it really is a disappointment. You’ll have an okay time if you do go, but pretty much all the jokes are in the trailers and nothing much wilder than that happens in the finished film. Plus, there is an enormous problem right smack in the middle of it, and it’s…
What Does NOT Work: Steve Carell. I decided to open with what doesn’t work, because it’s so central to why this movie is skippable. By now, Steve Carell just needs to play somebody other than a buttoned-down, buffoonish idiot (Anchorman, Dinner for Schmucks, The Office) or a buttoned-down, depressing, repressed quasi-idiot (Date Night, Little Miss Sunshine, Crazy Stupid Love, everything else he’s ever been in). The very last movie he was in was Crazy, Stupid, Love and in it he played a repressed square who got dumped by his wife in the first scene…here he plays a repressed square who gets dumped by his wife in the first scene. Why would a once-promising comedian decide to play Rick Santorum for the rest of his life?
Seriously, his character here is about the most boring person anyone could spend their final days with (the movie begins when the Earth has only 21 days left) and I didn’t want to spend 2 hours with him. This is the kind of guy who keeps living his life as if nothing has changed, who keeps going to work, who RUNS out of an orgy, who RUNS when a pretty girl tries to give him a blow job, who drives across country to see a girl and then leaves her a N-O-T-E when he could just knock on the door and talk to her. His character refuses to cut loose in a-n-y w-a-y and it becomes so frustrating that eventually you don’t care that the world is ending, so long as you’re freed from this character. This man who would live the rest of his life in exactly the same tedious, soul-devouring way whether it was 3 weeks or 30 years.
What Does Work: You may have seen on TV when they advertise that Rob Cordroy and Patton Oswalt are in this? Well they are, for exactly one scene. Still, that one dinner party scene provides roughly 90 percent of the movie’s laughs, along with a great cameo by Community’s Gillian Jacobs. Derek Luke, William Peterson and Martin Sheen also make subtle impressions along the road. And it’s hard not to feel sorry for Keira Knightley (perhaps the real soul of the movie), who’s stuck spending her end days with the absolute worst person on Earth she could choose, instead of her family in England or Luke’s survivalist, one of the few people to realize you CAN survive a meteoroid impact.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Imagine you paid to see this movie, and in the first five minutes Steve Carell’s character dies OR—-perhaps less likely—-actually wakes the fuck up and begins to cut loose the way he should. But, a man can only dream, for in reality that movie would probably star Jason Bateman, a much more interesting actor who can actually show the hidden cleverness of button-downed characters instead of using a shield of moroseness to fake depth.