Review: 'Don't Look Up' is an end-of-the-world comedy that loses its subtlety as it takes aim at too-easy targets

Director Adam McKay’s broad-brush political satire “Don’t Look Up” asks the question we all have avoided asking for the last two years: What would happen if the wrong people were in charge when it appeared as if the world was about to end?

That’s the scenario set in motion when Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), an astronomy doctoral candidate at Michigan State, one night sees something new in the night sky: A comet. The good news is that, as its discoverer, the powers that be name it Comet Dibiasky. The bad news is that when her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), does the calculations for the comet’s trajectory, the inescapable conclusion is that the comet will hit Earth in six months, obliterating humanity.

The question for Kate and Randall becomes: Who do we tell? And who will believe us?

The answer to the first question is Dr. Clayton “Teddy” Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), chief scientist for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office — and, as the movie points out, that’s a real thing. On Teddy’s say-so, Kate and Randall are flown immediately to Washington, D.C., to tell the president their findings.

That’s where the real trouble starts for our Michigan astronomers. The president, Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep), is a know-nothing blowhard more concerned with her approval rating, and her scandal-plagued Supreme Court nominee, than the imminent end of everything. Same goes for her chief of staff, her son Jason (Jonah Hill), a bro-dude nepotism hire. Where on Earth does McKay get the ideas for these wacky characters who couldn’t possibly have any basis in our recent reality?

Next stop is the press, which comes with its own sets of problems. The reputable papers are too cautious to take the threat too seriously. Meanwhile, Kate and Randall go on a morning cable-news show, where the oppressively perky hosts (played by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry) are too interested in the latest romantic problems of a pouty pop star (played by Ariana Grande) then in a killer comet. When Kate loses her cool on live TV, she becomes fodder for a thousand internet memes.

Other characters work their way into the mix, including a tech company CEO (Mark Rylance) who talks like a cult leader, a politically incorrect war hero (Ron Perlman), and Randall’s no-nonsense wife June (Melanie Lynskey), who sees her husband’s personality change in the middle of the media storm.

McKay, who co-wrote the story with journalist and political activist David Sirota, has plenty to say about the inability of our current political leaders to cope with a genuine, non-partisan crisis — whether it’s a comet or climate change — as well as the media’s shortcomings, or celebrity-driven culture, and our constant seeking of quick solutions from our technology gurus.

There are some nuggets of sharp humor throughout the movie, from DiCaprio’s panic attack before going on TV to Lawrence’s character’s running obsession with the perplexing behavior of a top Pentagon general (Paul Guilfoyle). And both Streep and Blanchett nail their character’s parallel strains of self-centered blonde cluelessness. 

But what this Oscar-laden line-up — DiCaprio, Lawrence, Streep, Rylance, Blanchett and McKay himself (for adapted screenplay for “The Big Short”) all have statuettes at home — seems to be missing is a sense of how to make this doomsday satire consistently funny. The key is to emphasize the terror of the world’s end to the absurd degree, the way Stanley Kubrick (“Dr. Strangelove”) or Douglas Adams (“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”) did with slashing wit.

“Don’t Look Up” suffers from not being absurd enough, because the surreal truth of American politics outpaced the incredulity of fiction sometime around the 2016 election. It’s hard to laugh at scenes so similar to ones that were making you cry when they played out on CNN.

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‘Don’t Look Up’

★★

Opens Friday, December 10, in theaters; available for streaming starting December 24 on Netflix. Rated R for language throughout, some sexual content, graphic nudity and drug content. Running time: 145 minutes.