Film Daze

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is a hard movie to place. It is not quite a comedy, really. Nor is it a drama. Black comedy sort of makes sense, but for me, black comedies are much darker than this. I wouldn’t call this a rom-com necessarily either. It is some weird mash-up of all of these and it doesn’t quite work for me.

The movie is about the end of the world arriving. An asteroid his heading for Earth and our Armageddon team failed. There are X number of weeks till the world ends. The first bits of the movie are just about people’s reactions to this news. Eventually things develop with Dodge (Carell) and a road trip ensues.

The cast is great. I like Steve Carell. I think he is actually a damn good actor. To prove this actually look at his roles. He is the straight man ¹ The roles he plays aren’t the zany guys just doing goofy shit. He pretty much always does a good job and this is yet another example. I wasn’t sold  on Keira Knightly though. She’s not someone I hate, but she didn’t really fit in to the movie that much to me, which is pretty much how the entire movie felt. It just didn’t really fit.

The cameos are constant and sort of hit or miss. It’s great to see some great comedians showing up, but a lot of the appearances were a let down. This really had nothing to do with their acting, just the lack of them having much to do. TJ Miller was sort of great, but again he really doesn’t do much. Same with some others like Patton Oswalt. Hell, Martin Sheen is in here and suffers the same fate. It was cool to see all of that talent, but it was wasted.

It wasn’t a bad movie, it just didn’t really make much of an impact with me. I really didn’t develop much of an opinion to sway me either way. It’s something that if I run across it some time down the road I wouldn’t be opposed to give it another shot, but it’s nothing I am going to seek out.