One dull apocalypse

June 22, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

Nobody underplays forlorn, vulnerable guys better than Steve Carell. His brand of schnook isn’t the insecure intellectual that Woody Allen perfected or the average Joe with inner nobility patented by Tom Hanks. Carell’s signature character is an earnest dork with a good heart and bad luck.

In his latest, his misfortune is Armageddon itself. The doomsday comic romance “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World” has plenty of tonal problems — given the concept, how could it not? — but Carell’s introspective, dryly funny performance is a consistent delight.

Carell plays Dodge, a midlevel insurance exec whose wife bolts in an early scene, unwilling to spend another day in his decent, dull presence. With an asteroid just days away from pulverizing Earth, writer/ director Lorene Scafaria imagines that most people will simply carry on, unable to digest the enormity of imminent extinction.

Clients of Dodge’s insurance company call for clarifications about their coverage, and his gamely upbeat boss asks the dwindling staff, “Who wants to be CFO?” There’s some looting and amoral shenanigans, of course. At a dinner party, some of Dodge’s middle-class friends take a stab at Weimar Berlin decadence, offering heroin and sexual encounters alongside the cocktails. In a wry, deliberately repugnant cameo, Patton Oswalt pulls upright Dodge aside, informing him that as of now, nothing is off limits.

This glimpse into the abyss is quickly abandoned, Scafaria having wandered uncomfortably out of her depth. Rather than the reckless, exaggerated comedy that the end-of-days premise demands, the film regresses to tried-and-tired rom-com chicanery. Dodge and neighbor Penny (Keira Knightley) meet cute and bond during a cross-country trip to reunite him with a lost love and her with her parents. The result is an exercise in shameless audience manipulation, weakly imagined, blandly sentimental and totally predictable.

While Carell’s mix of humor, resignation and psychological realism is effective, Knightley is unconvincing as a gee-gosh-golly 2010s flower child. Penny is not a character, but rather an assortment of behavioral tics and sitcom-simple character traits thrown into a box and shaken. She’s a contrived oddball dream girl who exists only to give Dodge a second chance at youth.

Martin Sheen, Derek Luke and William Petersen feel equally unconvincing in supporting roles. They play, respectively, a kindly pilot, a survivalist romantic rival for Dodge and an enigmatic motorist, but they’re really onscreen to prolong the rudderless story to feature length. The movie suffers from narrative aimlessness.

Scafaria has done the almost impossible. She has made an apocalypse story dull.