Don’t Look Up — DiCaprio and Streep struggle in calamity comedy

When Leonardo DiCaprio realises the scale of the problem in the despairing satire Don’t Look Up, he does what most of humanity would do. He tries to rub it out. The actor plays Dr Randall Mindy, a timid professor of astronomy mapping a new comet with wide-eyed delight. “Look at the arc,” he beams by the whiteboard to the punky colleague who discovered it, Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence). Then he pauses. Ashen, Mindy wipes away his calculations. But there is no escaping the truth. In six months, the body will strike Earth. We are all — as is soon said often and at volume — going to die.

Among the unhelpful things humanity does next is make a movie: a dopey blockbuster called Total Destruction. An inconvenient truth is that, in 2021, Don’t Look Up itself would make a sharper parody of the good intentions the film business might muster in the face of doom (climate change, say) than Total Destruction.

In a Netflix presentation of awkward tone and ritzy cast, Lawrence and DiCaprio are joined in Adam McKay’s black comedy by actors including Cate Blanchett, Timothée Chalamet and Meryl Streep. The latter naturally plays a US president of gross populist bent. The movie proceeds as bitter, zany war game. What if the world was ending and everyone stared at their phone? Except — ah no — that’s reality.

McKay’s recent movies freewheeled through the 2008 financial crisis (The Big Short) and career of Dick Cheney (Vice). Where next but Armageddon? The screwball rhythms remain but now feel like spinning wheels. Paralysis and power-grabs as extinction looms are tough jokes to land without seeming shrill, and the brush used here is broad. McKay knows it. For all the digs at old media, new media and Professor Mindy’s ascent to fame — some of them pretty funny — self-loathing also hangs in the air. It is as if the movie is aware it will not motivate one finger to lift in protest. On the quiet, the film might see the comet as a blessing. (Incidentally, McKay has as little to say about or to anyone outside America, as you imagine did Total Destruction.)

It all looks set to go down badly with critics; understandable given our own vast contribution to saving the planet. Even trying to match Dr Strangelove is considered a red rag, for Kubrick is in a league of one. (Peter Sellers might have grudgingly admired Mark Rylance, the best thing here, as a glacial tech zillionaire, an alloy of every Randian chancer Silicon Valley ever made a god.) The most likely end for this sad, quixotic movie will be to make someone unlucky a bummer of a Christmas double-bill. It’s a wonderful life, said Frank Capra. Indeed it was, says McKay.

★★☆☆☆

In UK cinemas now and on Netflix from December 24