Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)

If you had just three weeks to live, what would you do? Try and see long-lost friends and relatives before the time came? Make an effort to re-connect with an old love? Finally get round to reading War and Peace? Travel as much as you could? Go on a crime spree? With an asteroid called Matilda hurtling towards the planet, that's the very conundrum facing Dodge Petersen (Steve Carell). Within moments of the car radio telling them that a last-ditch attempt to stop Matilda has failed, Dodge watches on as his wife Linda (Nancy Carell) gets out of the car and runs away from him and their life together. It's probably for the best anyway: she was having an affair and he only married her because he was scared of dying alone. Some people try and flee, as his wife did. Others join orgies and parties and some get things over with and take their own lives. Dodge reacts altogether differently, carrying on his humdrum life as normal. He goes to work, checks his empty letterbox and tries to tell his cleaning lady that with the apocalypse approaching, she doesn't have to come to work anymore. She thinks he's trying to fire her, so he relents and lets her carry on.

Dodge's friends aren't interested in business as usual, not in the slightest. Warren (Rob Corddry) and Diane (Connie Britton) invite him to a dinner party and try and set him up with their enthusiastic friend Karen (Melanie Lynskey), reasoning that no-one should die alone. They've hit the nail on the head - he doesn't want to die alone, but other than that, he doesn't know what he wants. He does know however that he's not interested in Karen or Diane's sexual advances, nor does he fancy taking heroin. So, he leaves the party and goes home. As he reminisces about Olivia, his old high school sweetheart, he sees his neighbour Penny (Keira Knightley) crying outside his window. She's missed the last flight back to England to see her family so he consoles her and invites her in. She falls asleep on his sofa and the next morning, gives him a pile of letters that the postman had wrongly delivered to her apartment over the years. They've never spoken before despite being neighbours for a long time so she has no idea that the man she assumed was his "roommate's boyfriend" was in fact his wife's lover. After trying to kill himself, Dodge reads the letters and finds one from Olivia where she tells him that she's divorced with a son and that he was the love of her life. Filled with a renewed sense of purpose and with a crowd of looters approaching their apartment block, he rescues Penny and tells her that if she helps him track down Olivia, he will hook her up with his friend who has a private plane that can take her back home to Surrey.

Thus begins the movie proper and from this point onwards it's a strange romantic drama-cum-black comedy-cum-apocalyptic science fiction film. Some parts work really well. For example, Dodge maintaining the semblance of a normal life as the sky falls around him (literally); the dinner party at Warren and Diane's; almost joining in an orgy at a diner and attending a mass baptism at a beach. It's just a pity that so many scenes fall flat on their face. Dodge's attempt to commit suicide was either supposed to be poignant or funny and it couldn't decide which. Dodge and Penny's encounter with an unusually vigilant policeman sees the film swerve completely off course and delivers easily the most boring and frustrating five minutes of the film. Their meeting with survivalists had promise but it was completely lacking any satirical edge and just felt like it had been shoehorned in. The only joke had at their expense came when they walked in on one of them on the toilet. Martin Sheen's character likewise feels tacked on and doesn't serve much purpose other than to provide a plot device. Finally, the ending. I can see some people really liking it, but I didn't really. I won't spoil it but of the three main ways I thought it could have ended as I was watching it - abrupt black comedy, tearful reunion and unhappy resolution - they picked the weakest of the three. After it finishes I wondered if there was an alternate ending but there is not.

Strange and unholy mash-up it might be but fortunately, there is glue holding the whole ramshackle structure together and it is the performances of Carell and Knightley. He deadpans his way through the film, his occasional outbursts of emotion and playful flirting making for a confidently understated performance. She is full of spunky energy, another excellent performance to add to the already long list. Together they make a likeable and believable pairing, often providing the only high points in scenes that otherwise drag along under the weight of their own superfluousness.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is a bit of a strange film and has as many hits as it does misses. It would all come unstuck were it not for Steve Carell and Keira Knightley. She in particular is superb and without their winning performances, the whole thing would come crashing down.

6 out of 10.