Film review: Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World

Take Dodge (Steve Carell), an insurance salesman whose wife (played by Carell’s real-life spouse Nancy) walks out on their marriage because Armageddon seems a good a reason to bail on a man so wedded to routine that he continues to go to the office even after it is announced that the world will end in 21 days.

Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World (15)

Director: Lorene Scafaria

Running time: 101 minutes

“Anyone want to be head of the company?” his supervisor asks the dwindling group of employees. Meanwhile, his friends dispense with all inhibitions and host a pre-expiration dinner party where Rob Corddry serves dry martinis to kids, while his wife (Connie Britton) gratefully welcomes a guest who arrives not with a BYOB but a gift of heroin.

Across the hallway from his apartment, Dodge’s daffy neighbour Penny (Keira Knight­ley) wants to spend her last day with her family back in England but has missed the last plane out of the US. Eventually Dodge concedes that he knows someone a few hundred miles away who owns a plane and owes him a favour, and that he wouldn’t mind reconnecting with a long lost high school girlfriend either. This is their cue to hit the road in Penny’s car, with the countdown clock ticking to the apocalypse and the moment where Dodge and Penny will realise that they can seek consolation in each other. It seems even fatalism is tidy.

The trailer for the film suggests that this is a comedy, but the tone is far more wayward than that, sometimes a drama, sometimes a sentimental journey and often spiked with hit-and-miss humour. The first act’s attempts at irony are often pretty awful, as is Adrien Brody as Keira’s whiny wrong ’un boyfriend. Better are the snapshots of people deciding to live for the moment; a queue of couples lining up for weddings is rather lovely, and I liked the bucket list of unfulfilled ambition that could only stretch to “I’m finally going to take that pottery class.”

Since Seeking A Friend For The End of The World accepts the end as being unstoppably nigh, after a last ditch attempt to derail the asteroid headed our way fails, the film stays grounded on Earth, where people struggle to come to grips with their mortality and what life meant, and means, to them. However, the real battle is getting past how badly miscast Keira Knightley and Steve Carell are as a couple, and if that sounds queasy, wait till you witness a sex scene that goes with a whimper, not a bang.

So if you can only endure one film about the end of the world, I recommend Don Mc­Kellar’s Last Night. If you can endure two, try Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. As for Seeking… bring on the asteroid.