Movie Review: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Movie Review: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

The apocalypse isn’t a bad pretext for hooking up, but it’s somewhat high-risk: what if you regretted your choice of soul-mate? The 1998 Canadian film Last Night, which was terrific, wondered what lonely folk might do with their final hours, and didn’t shy away from the possibility of getting them all wrong.

The deadline in the quite-a-lot-less-terrific Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is more like a month. Humanity’s last hope, in the presumed though unseen shape of (say) Bruce Willis in Armageddon, has just failed to deflect an asteroid from its collision course. Many opt for suicide, and it looks like our hero, the groan worthily-named Dodge (Steve Carell), might be heading that way. His wife has walked out, and a career in insurance feels like a cosmic joke.

Enter Penny (Keira Knightley), the helpfully available lass next door, and a character type perfectly defined by the American critic Nathan Rabin as “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”. Natalie Portman played one in Garden State, Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown. Knightley tries her best to outdo them in sunny-yet-neurotic life force. Penny wears ill-matched coats over wispy skirts, scrunches her face a lot, and hugs a cluster of favourite records to her chest. The movie reaches a low point when she extols the tactile joys of vinyl to Carell, who listens with dewy-eyed attention, missing the cue of any sane person to stare skyward and plead with the asteroid to hurtle a bit faster.

I’m being harsh, but Lorene Scafaria’s film unfortunately invites a lethal dose of scepticism towards its cutesy last-ditch matchmaking, obligatory road-trip plotting, and thinly funny jibes at the rest of humankind.

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Posted by Fahad Zafar on Dec 5 2012. Filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.