After the freighting discovery of a massive comet heading to Earth, Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) quickly calls out to her professor at MIT, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), about the catastrophe waiting to happen.  After confirming her math, the two frantically try to get the attention of President Orlean (Meryl Streep) to deflect and destroy the comet, but she is more interested in her own political trajectory.  The pair of scientists find an outlet in The Daily Rip hosted by Jack Bremmer (Tyler Perry) and Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett), and the news begins to spread like wildfire as it morphs through memes and conspiracy theories. 

Adam McKay directs a way too on the nose social commentary Don’t Look Up for Netflix.  At a bloated 138-minutes, the script quickly grows irritable as it repeats the same few jokes ad nauseum and becomes a parody of itself.  There are few things more embarrassing than watching as a script clearly is setting up joke after joke and not a single one actually lands.  In his current phase of prestige filmmaking, The Big Short (2015) and Vice (2019), he has the benefit of following the blueprint given to us by the real events, but with Don’t Look Up he is given free rein over the story and any sense of subtlety and nuance is stripped away.  His more is more writing style here is pandering to the audience as he continually tries to explore the same simple thesis over and over, made worse that his audience already probably agrees with him. 

The blunt and unsubtle nature does, however, work in the favor of Lawrence whose real-life persona of a try-hard, relatable, every girl carries over onscreen in her role as Dibiasky.  She is edgy.  She is cool.  She is clearly smarter than anyone else in the room, and she is an absolute bore to watch on screen as she sneers and snaps at anyone in a position of authority because she is a girl boss, but don’t mistake her for being like other girls because she dresses with a punk style and doesn’t care about celebrity reality shows. The later romance with the counter-culture street rat Yule (Timothée Chalamet) is uninspired, unmotivated, and unconvincing at best. While Yule is the closest thing to a believable character and actually presents an interesting view on religion, Chalamet is totally unequipped from McKay’s script to do anything to course correct the downward spiral of the film by the time he is introduced.    

DiCaprio on the other hand suffers under the terrible writing as he finds his character to be nothing more than a sweaty, bumbling, nervous mess with no real arc or development.  The few choices made by the character that drives the subplot of the film are not supported by the characterization or the plot and are hindered further by the terrible pacing overall.  It all leads to a blowout proclamation in the late quarter of the film that, if anyone is still tuned in enough to pay attention to the words, finds it all just an elementary-level analysis of the state of the world. He is just one of any of these A-List stars whose agents signed them up for an important social commentary but find their talent being wasted on what reads like a poorly written episode of South Park. McKay also seems totally unaware of the fact that he is lampooning celebrity-obsessed culture while relying on that same culture to reel in the oh-so-precious viewership minutes for Netflix. There might be some semblance of self-awareness in his handling of empty-headed pop-bimbo Riley Bina (Ariana Grande), but with how tone-deaf the rest of the film is, it is likely missed here by the self-important writer as, much like real life, the empty words from the starlet are only uttered to keep her brand trending on Twitter.    

McKay smugly writes Streep as the president whose only true care is her poll ratings with her fratbro son, Jason (Jonah Hill), as her Chief of Staff to make an already well-known fact that nepotism is bad, and that it runs rampant in the upper levels of society.  His handling of gender here is so unnecessary and self-congratulatory in a day and age when we have a woman serving as vice president and in all other levels of politics, as well as countless women in science and technical fields, too.  It is not as sharp and as biting as McKay thinks the setup is, and that he cast it in such a way to garner outrage is nothing more than a cheap trick.  The irony of that statement is not lost here, but the umbrage comes more from the blatantness of it all than from the actual casting choices.  It is McKay in his echo chamber playing to the lowest common denominator and acting like he is making a profound statement. He wants to enrage the right while gaining praise from the left, but it is so transparent and hollow in its execution, his only achievement here is to be a nuisance for all.  

A misfire on all cylinders, Don’t Look Up has no clue who its audience is and therefore talks down to the people that are already on McKay’s side of the aisle.  He wears his political ideology on his sleeve and he is not winning any supporters to the cause with his antics. This film does little more than to highlight the worst of both sides which is the worst thing for a politically charged satire to do.  It does not give any chance for hope and totally misses the point that when the comet does hit earth, the impressive cast list behind this film will already be sipping champagne in the first class section of the escape pod while the celebrity-obsessed, too-stupid-to-understand-what-is-happening, everyman whom this film continually talks down to will be left to rot. What McKay doesn’t realize is that this holier than thou attitude is incredibly off-putting and even for those that agree with the message of the film they will find it hard to identify with such petulance. At this point, he has solidified himself as cinema’s version of Ryan Murphy in that he can definitely be an idea man, but he lets his ideology take over his projects and would be better off sticking to “story by” credits while letting more skilled writers and directors bring those ideas to the screen in a much more palatable way that actually respects the intelligence of its audience and can foster a true conversation instead of just pointing fingers and ruffling feathers.