Don’t Look  Up, Meryl Streep Is The ‘Trump’ Card Of  Netflix’s Wacky Apocalyptic Oddity

Don’t Look Up(Netflix)

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio ,Jennifer Lawrence , Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande, Scott Mescudi, Himesh Patel, Melanie Lynskey, Michael Chiklis, Tomer Sisley, Paul Guilfoyle, Robert Joy, Gary Tanguay, Cate Blanchett and Meryl Streep.

Written & Directed by Andrew McKay

Rating: ** ½

Not half as awful  as the savage reviews suggest, Don’t Look Up is that  oddball  comedy about the  end  of the world which takes  swiping potshots at   the Establishment without any  lasting impact.

Only in an American comedy as irreverent and  savage as this would we have a young scientist played  by Jennifer Lawrence(oddly listless)telling the moronic  US  President(Meryl Streep , doing a Trump in drag) that she  didn’t  vote for him, and boy, is she glad she didn’t!

If irreverence be the food of satire, then play on! … Don’t Look Up is  just your  poison.  It is viciously anti-establishment and  adroitly  bang-on in its endeavour to bring down all the holy cows  of   the Establishment. While Streep is  a scream as the tone-deaf Prez, Jonah Hill as the Chief Of Staff who happens,  just happens, to be   the Prez’ s son, is a riot of ambivalent ideology and scrambled  priorities.

 Taking the extreme view, the spoofy  goofy  film painstakingly takes down the  governmental  machinery, part by part,  and exposes it for what  it is : inept and  brutally  insensitive.

We get that. But once this pattern  of  exposing  the  dimwitted administration is established,a numbing monotony  kicks into the  satire which grows from tantalized  to just plain   tired.It’s as if  the more noise the  presentation makes, the less it deserves  to be heard.  After  a point  Don’t Look Up just  continues  to go around in  exasperating circles. In fact, the last 45 minutes  of the  plot could easily be done away with.

  By the time  the  highly-regarded Timothee Chalamet shows up for a spot of  kissy-kissy with Jennifer Lawrence   the film is  more or less dead on survival.Speaking of  intimacy,  our Gujarati  Himesh Patel(remember  him from Danny Boyle’s Yesterday?) shows up early in the bustling self-important  goings-on as  Jennifer Lawrence’s slimy boyfriend named ‘Philip’. Not Indian, I presume?

There are  some highpoints,  though. Besides Streep who is  the  plot’s ‘Trump’ card, Leonardo diCaprio’s  scruffy scientist’s act is  enjoyable. His meltdown on  a news channel is the  cutoff  point , after which the  narration goes rapidly downhill. Cate Blachett as a  predatory  news anchor and specially Mark Rylance as a spaced-out philanthropist  billionaire are  sexily  cocky in spurts.But  I am not too sure  such  incentives add up to an experience worth   expending our 190 minutes  over. There is  nothing  earth-shattering about  this  satire  on an  earth-destroying  comet. It takes savage  swings at  several sacred  institutions   of   American democracy without  hitting target.