Don’t Look Up  ★★★½

WITH his last few films and the television series Succession, American writer/director Adam McKay has re-invented himself.

He came out of Saturday Night Live to make mainstream comedies like Anchorman and Step Brothers but 2015’s The Big Short proved he could successfully combine comedy, drama and political commentary.

Since then he has upped the ante with Vice and now Don’t Look Up which has all of Hollywood’s liberal A-listers full of praise.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Timothée Chalamet, Ariana Grande, Cate Blanchett and Meryl Streep are among those joining McKay to bring his black comedy about climate change denial to the screen.

There’s nothing subtle about McKay’s treatment as he constantly takes aim at those who choose to actively or passively ignore the threat of global extinction.

It isn’t necessarily a great idea to use destruction by meteor as your metaphor because it’s too easy for the naysayers to dismiss the comparison regardless how black your humour is.

But the good thing is McKay eschews some of the cinematic tricks he dwelled on in Vice and The Big Short in favour of more traditional story-telling and presentation which hopefully holds the attention of more viewers.

Lawrence, whom we haven’t seen in a film for several years, plays Kate Dibiasky, an astronomy student who discovers a new comet.

Amidst the euphoria of the find, Kate and her professor, Dr Randall Mindy (DiCaprio), determine that the so-called ‘planet killer’ is on a collision course with Earth and moving at a rate that will destroy us all in about six months.

After NASA confirms their findings, Planetary Defense Coordination Office head, Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe, gets them an audience with US President Janie Orlean (Streep) and Chief of Staff Jason Orlean (yep, her son) which doesn’t go well, to say the least.

Kate and Randall then embark on a series of failed attempts to convince the world that the threat is real, battling government indifference, the cult of celebrity, general apathy and the facile nature of the media and internet.

Along the way they also have to deal with Mark Rylance’s tech-company billionaire Peter Isherwell who, after discovering the meteor contains valuable minerals, uses his financial influence to convince the government to let him break up rather than completely destroy it so that smaller pieces will still fall to Earth.

All the cast have a good time with their characters, particularly DiCaprio and Streep, with other stand-outs Jonah Hill (as usual) as the President’s smart-ass son, Cate Blanchett as a manipulative television morning show host and Ron Perlman as a gormless, right-wing war veteran called on to lead a space mission.

While McKay’s film is entertaining and well-intentioned, I’m not sure it will ultimately change many opinions. Then again, that just reinforces his point.