SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD: please god, not like this

I sincerely hope that this is not the way it all ends.
With an enormous asteroid on course to smash into planet Earth writer-director Lorene Scafaria's vision of mankind's final few weeks is irredeemably sappy, spineless and dull.

If there's anything positive to be said for her debut directorial effort (and I'm trying hard here to find something) it makes a change, I guess, from the usual depictions of imminent global extinction.   Barring one isolated, small scale riot on the block where the story's hero lives there's barely any breakdown in law and order (at least, not on the east coast of the United States), and too many people seem content (or resigned) to continuing with life much as normal. The few who plan something special display less imagination or creativity than they would organizing a New Year's Eve party.
It's all depressingly dull.
Just like the hero of our story, Dodge.
As played by a suitably sappy looking Steve Carell, Dodge is one of life's losers, a functionary in a large, impersonal insurance company, he's just been abandoned by his wife and now faces the end of the world alone. Too battered by life's misfortunes to rally himself he plods on with his daily routine despite the pointlessness of it all.
Until that is circumstances bring him together with Penny (Keira Knightley), his downstairs neighbour. She has a similarly bumpy lovelife and Dodge seizes the opportunity to rescue her from her oafish boyfriend and a rampaging mob and offers to help her find a pilot who can fly her home to England to be with her family, if she'll first go with him to find his high-school sweetheart.
And so the long, boring heart of the story gets underway.
Dodge is so bland he gives 'nice' a bad name while Penny is just implausible. Knightley is a talented actress with many strings to her bow but playing a slightly kookie free spirit with no credible reason for living in America is not one of them. She just doesn't sound right - not a single line trips convincingly from her lips - and she looks awful. Not only is she sporting the world's worst haircut but Scafaria has a habit of shooting her in profile which serves only to emphasize her underbite and give the impression of constant gurning.
When the world and every single individual in it is facing inescapable annihilation there really has to be more engaging stories to be told than that of Dodge and Penny. If the intention was sweetness the effect is saccharine - the kind that leaves an unpleasant aftertaste.