Don’t Look Up Post-Script: Adam McKay

This article is a post-script for my Don’t Look Up review. Read for context.

I’m angry. I miss Adam McKay, or more specifically the Adam McKay I grew up on. When I was a kid, I didn’t know who directors were. I knew the classic names of my childhood that were left over from the previous generation: Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola (I had never seen any of his films but knew that a horse featured in The Godfather). I became enamoured by cinema quickly and the names started flooding in. I was watching everything: Anderson, Kubrick, Hitchcock, the Coen’s, Cronenberg, Wright, Scott, Tarantino, Hughes.

No matter what I watched, comedy stuck with me. It’s like a comfort genre; the world of film can be quite exhilarating but that doesn’t mean I want to go skydiving every day. The king of comedy in the noughties has to be McKay, or Judd Apatow but it would be hard to decide who was funnier. Apatow had Seth Rogen as his curly-haired protagonist, but McKay had Will Ferrell. No contest*. The dynamic duo made four instant-classic comedies in the span of six years: Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, and The Other Guys. Witty, absurd, and enough asinine humour to rival a teenage boy’s notebook – McKay was going to rule the world.

McKay’s next directorial was to be Anchorman 2, an honourable attempt as sequels go, yet nowhere near as much lightening as the first. Will Ferrell also began to lose steam as the insta-cast for comedies: Get Hard , Daddy’s Home, Holmes & Watson. Ferrell hasn’t appeared in one of McKay’s films since the return of Ron Burgundy yet the pair still continue to produce together.

2015. I’m fifteen and know nothing about the economy. I understand economics and don’t need a lecture about inflation, but the economy, stock market, and any form of banking never seemed to make sense. It all felt so arbitrary, but McKay heard my prayers. Pivoting from the popcorn laugh, McKay turned towards the satirically dramatic with The Big Short, a film about the economy for those who know nothing about it.

Revolving around the 2008 market crash, McKay gives a lecture on the events leading up to the economic disaster through the eyes of his plucky brokers (investors? What’s important is they do something with money). It was intelligent: the film introduced me to a new world that I had never really cared for and taught me how interesting it can be. It was dramatically informed: although a lot of scenes take on more dramatized versions of reality, it was as real as any other biopic. It also had annotations: midway through scenes, Selena Gomez or Margot Robbie would interrupt to give a quick analogy explaining the current mess of jargon.

It was hilarious as it poked fun at the system by ridiculing it from the inside. These people weren’t incompetent, they were wilfully ignorant. They were blinded by their greed and you either got with the program or got left behind. Clearly biased, McKay tore into the system layer by layer; he didn’t just point a finger and call Wall Street morons, but he explained a situation and let it crumble on its own. After all, history was on his side.

Needless to say, I was extremely excited for Vice. A spiritual sequel to The Big Short, the dramatic comedy was to be another satirical venture, this time the spotlight falling onto the political ventures of Vice President Dick Cheney. Scored to The Killers’ The Man, the trailer promised another sharp-witted tale of complete corruption. I know very little about American politics except for the big scandals, Hamilton, and Obama’s first term to present, so I was ready to buy a ticket for McKay’s next rocket-fuelled lesson.

I saw it at the cinema with my girlfriend. I had shown her The Big Short earlier on in our relationship; it was a make-or-break moment and thankfully she loved it as much as I did. We were both extremely excited. The theatre was relatively empty and we had both seen the trailer enough to quote it back to each other. The film started awkwardly, but I didn’t want to judge a book by its cover, or at least by the first few pages. Alas, my premonitions were correct.

Vice had the same type of on-the-nose dialogue but didn’t shine like The Big Short. Where the predecessor was keen to move on, Vice loitered about and never really moved forward. It felt like it was always stuck in the same mud; characters were interesting but never intriguing, the comedy was amusing but rarely funny. A major part of what made The Big Short hilarious was the culmination of editing, direction, and cinematography working in harmony, something which Vice lacked. But for all its misgivings, it never felt fake.

That is why I am angry. Why does Don’t Look Up feel so fake? Why does every joke feel like an out-of-touch reference, like I’m watching walking stereotypes straight off the set of The Big Bang Theory? Why am I watching a barrage of insults sans the intelligence of his other satires – did no one ever teach you about Ad Hominem? After the two-film hiatus, was it the greater focus on comedy that led you astray? I never knew you could make me feel so disappointed.

*Apatow produced all but one of McKay’s 2000’s comedies. Win-win.