Review 'Don't Look Up': You'll laugh like hell

It’s time to sit tight and assess “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay’s broadly satiric take on global disaster now in theaters en route to Netflix on Dec. 24. Is it the “cynical, infuriating, insufferably smug” lampoon of its worst reviews or “the funniest movie of 2021” to reference a rave?

Audiences would best be served by cherrypicking the good stuff from a sea of unfocused choices, the kind that strand an all-star cast tasked with breathing life into thinly-drawn characters with little chance to resonate despite a needlessly flabby 145-minute running time.

Still, it’s high time we had a movie that makes a star of science. And Leonardo DiCaprio—showing a flair for farce that doesn’t negate seriousness—takes the MVP spot as Dr. Randall Mindy, an astronomer from Michigan State who panics when his protégé, Ph.D candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence with a nose ring), discovers a comet hurtling toward Earth.

And not just any comet, this baby is an extinction-level planet killer that will mark the end of days in just six months and change. POTUS (Meryl Streep) and her snarky chief-of-staff son (Jonah Hill, always welcome) Trumps to their core—ignore the problem. Midterm elections are coming and the Prez has another idiot to push through as a Supreme Court nominee.

Alert the media? Randall and Kate do a “Morning Joe”-type talk show, hosted by a fawning Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett tweaking Mika Brzezinski. She’s a riot when Kate—screaming “we’re all gonna die!”— has a meltdown on camera: “The handsome astronomer can come back anytime, but the yelling lady, not so much.”

And there you have it. Comedy chaos masked as a “Dr. Strangelove” spin that could be subtitled: “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb of Global Warming.” Though our climate crisis is barely mentioned, that topic clearly attracted environmentalist DiCaprio to a film about how a clueless public refuses to see the calamity staring it right in the face.

Sadly, an attack on our collective stupidity—as timely as an anti-vaxxer denying the latest of lethal COVID variants needs to tell pointed jokes that don’t crash so often on takeoff. In a lunge at grandiosity, McKay misses the stealth accuracy he brought to “The Big Short” and “Vice,” not to mention the spikes embedded in the silliness of “Anchorman” and “The Step Brothers.”

It’s the actors who don’t strain who score the highest. Mark Rylance is smarmy perfection as a global tech billionaire—think Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who seeks to mine the comet for profit. And Melanie Lynsky as Randall’s wife and the mother of his adult sons (a new look for Leo) brings a welcome human touch to scenes that don’t devolve into protracted “SNL” skits.

McKay, always alive with daring, is too sharp not to get in his licks. DiCaprio soars with a mad-as-hell tirade over how the media argues hotly over trivia yet draws smiley faces on impending doom. And Ariana Grande, as a pop goddess much like herself,” does a killer duet with King Cudi (”Just Look Up”) that recalls Slim Pickins riding an A-bomb to oblivion in “Dr. Strangelove.”

McKay retreats to the obvious when we most want him to find truth in the specific. But there’s no denying the film’s playful and provocative pleasures. You’ll laugh like hell at “Don’t Look Up”—how can you not with McKay at the helm—but the laughs don’t stick in the throat the way they must in a screwball comedy about utter hopelessness.