Brandon at Random Reviews

Sometimes you need to just watch a movie you’ve never heard of at all when you see it on your streaming services. Maybe you don’t even know any of the actors in it, maybe the director’s not familiar either. But sometimes you just need to take a little leap and try something you’re not as sure as you normally are about and hope it pays off in the most unexpected way.

In this movie I did recognize a lot of people. And not just in a “hey, they look kinda familiar, I’ll look them up on IMDb and figure out where the fuck I know them from”, but like, I actually knew these people by name. Steve Carell, Keira Knightley, Patton Oswalt, Rob Corddry, Adam Brody, Amy Schumer, Rob Huebel, Nancy Carell, William Peterson, Gillian Jacobs, TJ Miller, and Martin Sheen? What? And they’re all doing pretty good here, a lot of them are in it for like 30 seconds or so, but they all nail it while they’re on screen.

The movie focuses on Steve Carell and Keira Knighley who are neighbors in an apartment building and they meet each for the first time after the world is expected to end since whoever failed their mission to destroy an asteroid headed for Earth. It’s kind of weird, I heard this was a box-office bomb and I assumed it was because it was gonna be some kind of “This is the End” rip-off. Nope! This came out the year before that one! And the plots are not really that similar at all! I also don’t remember This is the End that well so I had to look up the plot on Wikipedia and yeah, not really even that close.

Carell plays a character he frequently seems to play, a typical man who is unlucky in love, and I wouldn’t change that for the world. Knightley is charming and British as she also frequently is, and the two of them do have decently good chemistry. I guess the problem is that there isn’t a lot of shit going on between the long beginning and the long end of this one. They both have their little separate journeys as characters and they do their own shit while trying to get where they were going.

All in all I’d say this was a good casual movie to check out some time. It’s not going to blow you away but it does have a lot to offer in the exploration of what’s important in life. This one is available on HBO. Try it, you might like it.

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

“Honey, I broke my guitar hand!”

“Aren’t they both your guitar hands?”