Review: 'Seeking a Friend For the End of the World' is Smart But Lost

Doomsday is coming in three weeks. "Deliverance", the last-straw space shuttle assigned to stop a 70-mile-wide asteroid named "Matilda" from crashing on earth has been destroyed. Steve Carell plays Dodge, an unhappy insurance salesman who is recently deserted by his wife. As Armageddon approaches, the most important thing to learn is that "no one wants to die alone". Talk about good timing, huh? He attends this party in the hopes of earning a sense of comfort. Trouble is, you're unlikely to earn some comfort if you're surrounded by parents who serve their children mixed drinks and couples who try to get cracked by smoking heroin. People don't really care what happens to them next, so they do everything they haven't tried out, or things that they didn't have the chance to do. Dodge's is to find his old flame that took detour when he let her. Like in that Katy Perry tune, "The One That Got Away".

Along the way he meets his neighbor Penny (Keira Knightley, Atonement) whom he makes company with until The End. Penny, and her energetic and optimistic nature made her, 1.) dump her stubborn beau (Adam Brody), 2.) build a collection of stupendous records from Scott Walker to John Cale, and 3.) miss the last commercial flight to go back home to her family. Together, they pursue their end-of-the-world tasks. But come clean, we already know where this is headed, don't we? Thanks to Knightley and Carell, whose charm together gets you reeled in, makes the movie engrossing. Knightley ably plays her character (sometimes all too much) and Carell resumes the unwittingly funny abandoned husband character he did on Crazy, Stupid, Love. We don't get to see Brick Tamland from Anchorman and The 40-Year-Old Virgin Andy in Carell's Dodge, but he's still funny all right.

Director-writer Lorene Scafaria (Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist) goes behind-cam, with visions of the Apocalypse procreating the most morbid and sardonic thoughts of people towards The End. People crazed by the thought of easy sex and the friendliest of "Friendly's" restaurants (giving people free food and fun to people, and an orgy too if it's your birthday) makes Seeking a Friend For the End of the World the most fun as far as apocalyptic-rom-com movies go. Scafaria, however, appears lost from the second half of the film, struggling to find the right voice to tell her tender and charming story. But you've got to forgive her, because she's her. And she brought us Nick & Norah, and that was that [this is me favoring one good filmmaker]. B