“Don’t Look Up” sees McKay (“Anchorman:
The Legend of Ron Burgundy” and “Talladega
Nights”) returning to comedy after turning to
darker, political themes in “The Big Short,” about
the 2008 financial crisis, and “Vice,” his Dick
Cheney biopic.
As those last two films showed, McKay’s
filmmaking can be dazzling, brainy and so fast-
moving that one had better not sneeze for even
a moment. The material is less dense here —
the utter simplicity of a comet headed toward
Earth is the whole point, really — and nobody
suddenly launches into iambic pentameter, as
Christian Bale and Amy Adams memorably did
in “Vice” (although come to think of it, there are
actors here who’d be perfect — we have Meryl
Streep and Mark Rylance, for heaven’s sake).
But while I enjoyed the mix of humor and
emotion (and outright terror) — there are laugh-
out-loud moments and also deeply poignant
ones — some might find the tonal shifts a bit
jarring. Perhaps a more valid nit to pick is that
the the jampacked script doesn’t quite do all
these movie stars justice. And what a group
McKay has assembled: DiCaprio, Jennifer
Lawrence, Streep, Cate Blanchett, Rylance, Jonah
Hill, Timothée Chalamet, Tyler Perry, among
others. Not to mention Ariana Grande, who nails
her performance of a hilarious theme song.
We begin at Michigan State University, where, in
a terrific pre-credits sequence, astronomy grad
student Kate Dibiasky (Lawrence, feisty and funny
and perfect), doing some telescope work one day,
is stunned to realize she’s discovered a comet.
But when her mentor, Prof. Randall Mindy
(DiCaprio, toning down his charisma to portray