Another Moronic Comedy from the Formerly Funny Adam McKay

A t last, Adam McKay has given us his Dr. Strangelove. Watch out, Stanley Kubrick.

McKay’s end-of-the-world Netflix satire, Don’t Look Up, expends 140 brain-injuriously unfunny minutes (the bloat and flabbiness make it almost half again as long as Strangelove) propelling low-velocity spitballs at social media, Washington, tech moguls, Trumpism, and (this detail feels thrown in at the last minute) anti-vaxxers.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, each of them inexplicably made up to look as ghastly as possible, play Michigan State scientists who discover that a massive comet is heading straight for Earth and it’s an extinction-level event. We have six months to come up with a response, but America gets so distracted by all the dumb stuff we’re obsessed with, such as celebrity breakups, that it’s obvious we’re doomed.

McKay hasn’t made a funny movie in nearly 15 years (Step Brothers — before that, Anchorman and Talladega Nights) but he keeps attracting first-rate actors (as he did in Vice), and this one offers a star-packed cast and also Timothée Chalamet. Meryl Streep plays the blithe, selfish, and corrupt Trumpish president (an attempted spoof of Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter, maybe) who has a tramp stamp on her lower back and is trying to get a Sheriff David Clarke-type right-winger on the Supreme Court. (The nomination gets held up over a sexting scandal). For a chief of staff, she has chosen her own slick, arrogant son — Jonah Hill plays him as a spherical version of Jared Kushner.

McKay evidently has a bad case of Veep envy and tries hard to imitate that show’s zip and barbed cynicism, but nothing he writes (in a script coauthored with leftist writer David Sirota) would have made it out of the writer’s room on that show. McKay’s idea of a cutting gag is to have a Rush Limbaugh/Fox News type insist, as the world is about to end, “There’s only one story everyone’s talking about tonight: topless urgent-care centers!” The way McKay keeps teeing up watermelon-sized targets and then flailing away as ineffectually as a blindfolded toddler fills me with pity rather than anything else.

Is there anyone on the planet who didn’t notice breakfast-television hosts are vapid? McKay builds scene after excruciating scene around the idea that the big morning chat show, whose hosts are played by Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett, is so relentlessly cheerful that its peppiness drowns out the dire warning the scientists are trying to deliver on air, as Lawrence’s character, being blunt about the stakes facing humanity, becomes a meme and a figure of fun for shrieking about how we’re all gonna die. The New York Times, McKay thinks, would instantly lose interest in the most important story of all time if a subject didn’t present well on TV.

McKay’s idea of a Pentagon joke is a general who scams White House visitors out of 20 bucks for snacks that didn’t cost him anything, and he’s so in love with this gag that he does callbacks to it several times. Hill’s character is a rich materialist butthead, so he offers a “prayer for stuff” as mass extinction looms. A tech mogul played by Mark Rylance as a cross between Steve Jobs and Andy Warhol suggests trying to salvage the comet rather than send it away from Earth because it contains rare-earth minerals, but even tech billionaires probably aren’t that in love with death, although I’ll grant you that Jobs’s choosing to reject surgery to excise his lethal tumor was an eccentric choice.

McKay doesn’t use the words “Republican” or “Fox News” because he doesn’t want to give away anything about which way he leans, but the media organs in the movie spread the rumor that Jewish billionaires concocted the comet threat “so the government can confiscate our liberty and our guns.” When the comet gets so close to Earth that you can see it just by looking up, a right-wing, truth-denying “Don’t look up” movement is born. Get it? McKay could not be more ham-fisted if he got “Hormel” tattooed across his knuckles. This script is a battle between laziness and ineptitude that, somehow, both sides win.

When you’re recycling the same tropes every late-night comic has been trotting out every night for quite a few years, just for originality’s sake you have to do a little better than the Republicans-are-idiots and Trumpists-are-corrupt jokes that dribble out of McKay like a man with a prostate problem when he imagines he’s burning everybody with flamethrower the way DiCaprio did in his last movie. The fruit here isn’t low-hanging; it’s on the ground rotting, impossible to make a meal of. Really, why bother to mock a ditzy pop starlet (Ariana Grande) whose breakup with her boyfriend is constantly distracting everyone from the comet? To illustrate the shallowness of the media, McKay shows us a sports magazine cover that asks: “The End is Nigh: Will There be a Superbowl?” [sic]

Amid all of this silliness, the scientists burst back into the movie every ten or 15 minutes to uncork their screaming outrage about what dolts everyone is being. Breaking the mood for earnest speechifying is a bit of a no-no in satire; Strangelove was notably lacking in characters who interrupted the proceedings to yell at the audience that we’re all being idiots because actually nuclear war would be really bad.

There is a surprisingly touching and deep 2012 comedy on the same subject, the Steve Carell-Keira Knightley film Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, and we know McKay hasn’t seen it because if he had, there would have been no honorable option for him but to burn all prints of Don’t Look Up and check himself into the nearest monastery for penitence and self-abasement. The only wise line in McKay’s movie arrives at the very end: “We really did have everything, didn’t we?” True; we live in the best and richest society in the history of the planet, so maybe media figures such as McKay should try to cut back on the DEFCON One-level outrage about today’s ephemera.