Review No.170: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

It's true that the Apocalypse has been covered in many different ways over the years away from the obligatory sci-fi uses of the end of the world we've also had some more interesting efforts including last year's Lars Von Trier film Melancholia which divided opinion as I know people who both loved and hated it while I was somewhere in the middle. Playing the situation for laughs is writer/director Lorene Scarfaria, best known for her various work on indie films such as Whip It and Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, who presents a middle-management drone force to face the apocalypse on his own in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. In the film Steve Carell plays Dodge an insurance salesman whose wife leaves him directly after hearing that all efforts to stop an asteroid hurtling towards the Earth have been in vain so he has to soldier on alone. When he sees one of his neighbours, Keira Knightley's Penny, crying on the fire escape he lets her in only to discover she's upset that she'll never be able to get to see her folks in England again while he finds out that his first love wanted to see him once again however he never got the letter due to Penny holding onto his mail. Eventually the two make a pact - she helps him get to his lost love and in return he'll get to a guy he knows who has a plane so the rest of the film turns into a road movie and inevitably the two develop feelings for each other. Along the way we see how the apocalypse has affected other people with the staff at a TGI Fridays-esque restaurant getting a bit more saucy, one of the people they meet getting bumped off by an assassin and one of Penny's exes building a shelter in the hope of repopulating the Earth. In the end things take an unexpected turn as the pair both find what they're looking for but find out it's not necessarily what they wanted.

If you take Seeking a Friend for the End of the World as a number of set pieces then it works a lot better than as an overall film. I enjoyed several parts of it including a party Dodge attends, Dodge and Penny's heart-to-heart at his ex-girlfriend's parents' house and the discovery of who owns the plane. The film also has some beautiful location shots which cinematographer Tim Orr utilises especially a later scene on a beach where Penny and Dodge discover a lot of lost people getting married. Where the film falls down is that I never felt the believable nature of the relationship between Dodge and Penny despite Carrel and Knightley trying their hardest to play two people who had genuine feelings for each other. Throughout the film we meet several of Penny's former loves, including Adam Brody's waster Owen and Derek Luke's survivalist Speck, both of whom seem to want to do anything to hold onto her however she only has eyes for the man that insults her several times throughout the course of their journey. Individually though the two leads do a good job with Carell perfecting the hangdog expression we first saw on him in Little Miss Sunshine while Knightley's quirky Penny veers on the right side of being annoying. There are also some great cameos from Patton Oswalt, Rob Corddry and one towards the end of the film which I don't particularly feel like spoiling as for me the revelation was one of the best parts of the movie. The soundtrack is also great, someone sitting next to me in the cinema thought so too as she spent a lot of the time singing along to the more recognisable tunes, thanks to Penny's instance of bringing her records along with her this is a film that really knows how to use popular music to advance the story. As a whole though I don't think the story always worked and I felt that after it ended it went on for another ten minutes which spoilt the overall film plus I didn't really understand why Dodge would choose to keep a dog that was left as his feet for the rest of the film even though it was incredibly cute. Though there is indeed a lot to like in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World it still feels fairly uneven and runs longer than it should've done even though I feel it does do a good job of demonstrating how normal people would react if the world were to end in a couple of weeks.

Verdict: Good performances, a number of winning set-pieces and a great soundtrack are spoilt by a lack of chemistry between the two leads as well as an overlong ending so for that reason it gets 6.5/10