Not with a bang

In writer-director Lorene Scafaria’s Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Steve Carell plays Dodge, a married insurance man. One night, paused at a stop sign, Dodge and his wife Linda get some bad news on the car radio: A last-ditch space mission, intended to divert an asteroid nicknamed “Matilda” from its collision course with Earth, has blown up, and now Matilda is waltzing our way. The human race has four weeks to bend over and kiss its butt goodbye. As Dodge sits trying to take it in, Linda bursts into tears, jumps out of the car, and runs sobbing into the night, never to be seen again.

Dodge continues to show up at work, unable or unwilling to see the absurdity of business as usual for an insurance man when the world is about to end. By night, he sits in his apartment pining—not for Linda, his wife, but for Olivia, the college sweetheart who got away.

He is invited to a dinner party by friends Warren and Diane (Rob Corddry, Connie Britton), but when the party devolves into an end-of-days orgy, he tries to get away. “This is one thing you can’t run away from, Dodge,” Diane warns him (in case we’ve missed the symbolism of his name).

One night, Dodge finds his neighbor Penny (Keira Knightley), whom he barely knows, sobbing on the fire escape outside his window. She’s broken up with her boyfriend and is stranded an ocean away from her English home and family, now that commercial air service has been suspended. Dodge awkwardly offers comfort to her, but is uncomfortable with the offer himself. On top of that, he is more than a little miffed to learn that, as a result of their mail carrier’s sloppy delivery habits, she got a lot of his mail and has been carelessly sitting on it for months. Among all those bills and ads and junk mail, there’s a letter from Olivia, who after all these years has written to tell Dodge, “You were the love of my life.”

This is all the excuse Penny needs to prod Dodge into a cross-country quest to find Olivia and reconnect one last time before everything blows up. In fact, the explosions have already started and forced their hand—there are riots in the street outside, and Dodge and Penny barely manage to get her car started and underway before the looting and destruction engulf them.

From this point, Seeking a Friend becomes a picaresque adventure, as Penny and Dodge encounter a variety of characters on the road: a truck driver (William Petersen) who has hired an assassin to kill him suddenly and without warning; a roadside diner where the staff (including Gillian Jacobs and T.J. Miller) offer a range of off-the-menu services similar to the ones that made Dodge flee Warren and Diane’s party; a borderline-psycho-survivalist ex-boyfriend of Penny’s (Derek Luke) who believes he can ride out the apocalypse—and has a fleet of minicars to help Penny and Dodge continue their journey; and finally, Dodge’s estranged father (Martin Sheen). Oddly enough, the one person they never encounter (spoiler alert!) is Olivia; she becomes irrelevant for writer-director Scarafia’s purposes, which involve the growing relationship between Penny and Dodge. And that’s where Seeking a Friend for the End of the World runs into trouble.

There are loose ends and plot holes all through the movie, but they would scarcely matter if the central thread running from Dodge to Penny and back were strong, and grew stronger as the movie wore on—but it’s not, and it doesn’t. In almost any movie, there’s that mystery ingredient, chemistry, and here the chemistry is just a tick or two above nil; when, in time, Dodge whispers Olivia’s “love of my life” line to Penny, our reaction isn’t “Aw!” It’s “Huh?”

Nobody’s really to blame for this. It’s chemistry; sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn’t. Co-star chemistry is a specialty of Steve Carell’s—with Catherine Keener in The 40 Year Old Virgin; Juliette Binoche in Dan in Real Life; Anne Hathaway in Get Smart; Tina Fey in Date Night; Julianne Moore in Crazy, Stupid, Love.; even with Paul Rudd in Dinner for Schmucks.

With Keira Knightley, alas, it’s just not there. At the fadeout, Dodge may no longer be seeking a friendship, but we are.