After man's last ditch effort to stop it has failed, a gigantic meteor is going to collide with our planet, destroying all life on Earth. The end of days is quickly approaching. What will you do with the last few weeks of your life? That is the subject of the new film, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, starring Steve Carell and Keira Knightley.
Dodge (Carell) is alone; his wife ran out on him as soon as the news broke -- presumably to spend her final days with someone else -- and although his friends want to set him up with someone so that he won't be alone, Dodge can't get over his wife leaving him. He meets Penny (Knightley), a young British girl who lives in the same apartment building, and the two form an unlikely bond. She has missed the last commercial airplane flight back to her home and may never see her family again.
Whereas the rest of planet Earth seems to be treating their final time as a cross between the free love of the late 1960's and the chaos of the L.A. riots, Dodge and Penny are seemingly alone in their loneliness. So when Dodge decides to take a chance on tracking down an old flame, he strikes a deal with Penny -- if she helps him get to where he needs to be, he will help her find a way back to her family before the world ends.
The phrase "opposites attract" is certainly something that has been proven true in the past, both onscreen and off, but the likelihood of these two people getting together is so small that it puts a lot of pressure on the film (and performers) to make it believable. Unfortunately, it's not. It doesn't help that Dodge is the least interesting character in the entire movie. He's closed off, bruised, awkward socially -- a doormat, hoping to be as anonymous as possible -- just a minor variation of the same character Carell has played in many films before (Dan in Real Life, The 40-year old Virgin, Crazy Stupid Love), only this time he has even less to do, less to say, and is simply less engaging overall.
Also, the movie never finds a consistent tone, wavering between sentimentality, both lighthearted and broad humor, and brief stings of deadly seriousness. It's asking a lot of an audience to swing in that many directions and would take an extremely seasoned filmmaker to link those together. First-time director Lorene Scafaria (who adapted the screenplay for Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist, a film that really masters its tone) is ambitious to take on such a task, but not wholly successful at doing so here.
There are funny and touching moments in the film that work individually, but Seeking a Friend for the End of the World never seems to gel as a whole or connect its characters in anything other than a circumstantial way. I give it points for trying, but it would have been better to stick to heartbreaking with a touch of comedy (or just go completely outrageous). Instead, the film is at best a sometimes charming, sometimes funny film, or at worst, a sometimes dull and often predictable mess.
"Setting the Frame" Film Grade = C-
Whereas the rest of planet Earth seems to be treating their final time as a cross between the free love of the late 1960's and the chaos of the L.A. riots, Dodge and Penny are seemingly alone in their loneliness. So when Dodge decides to take a chance on tracking down an old flame, he strikes a deal with Penny -- if she helps him get to where he needs to be, he will help her find a way back to her family before the world ends.
The phrase "opposites attract" is certainly something that has been proven true in the past, both onscreen and off, but the likelihood of these two people getting together is so small that it puts a lot of pressure on the film (and performers) to make it believable. Unfortunately, it's not. It doesn't help that Dodge is the least interesting character in the entire movie. He's closed off, bruised, awkward socially -- a doormat, hoping to be as anonymous as possible -- just a minor variation of the same character Carell has played in many films before (Dan in Real Life, The 40-year old Virgin, Crazy Stupid Love), only this time he has even less to do, less to say, and is simply less engaging overall.
Also, the movie never finds a consistent tone, wavering between sentimentality, both lighthearted and broad humor, and brief stings of deadly seriousness. It's asking a lot of an audience to swing in that many directions and would take an extremely seasoned filmmaker to link those together. First-time director Lorene Scafaria (who adapted the screenplay for Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist, a film that really masters its tone) is ambitious to take on such a task, but not wholly successful at doing so here.
There are funny and touching moments in the film that work individually, but Seeking a Friend for the End of the World never seems to gel as a whole or connect its characters in anything other than a circumstantial way. I give it points for trying, but it would have been better to stick to heartbreaking with a touch of comedy (or just go completely outrageous). Instead, the film is at best a sometimes charming, sometimes funny film, or at worst, a sometimes dull and often predictable mess.
"Setting the Frame" Film Grade = C-
No comments:
Post a Comment