It's a Disaster: Funny till the very end of it all.

Sometimes I honestly wonder if I look forward to watching adverts more than the actual movie sometimes when I go to the cinema. There are those adverts that make you bristle with anticipation (I think I almost cried during the latest Man of Steel teaser),  but there are others that generate a great deal less of a good response. I have already wrongly dismissed one movie in the past year  on the basis of its commercial in Django Unchained, and it seems I have done so yet again with the new black comedy It's a Disaster.

It's a Disaster is all set around a traditional couples brunch in the middle of what appears to be a very lazy saturday afternoon. Glenn, played by the delightfully awkward David Cross (Tobias from Arrested Development) , and Tracy (Julia Stiles) have recently begun dating and Tracy has decided to introduce her new beau to her friends. Unfortunately, it appears there could not have been a worse occasion to do this, with tension and an imminent breakup threatening to derail the dinner party long before an apocalyptic scenario unfolds.

From the very beginning , the movie is set for some laughs- the opening shot being an old black and white photo of a seemingly wonderful beach, only for the camera to zoom out and reveal a bomb exploding in the ocean.


The film itself follows more or less the same approach, teasing you with normal scenarios and then turning them around on you spectacularly, meaning for some really funny moments. Truth be told, I've always been someone who can appreciate dark comedies, but I think even the most blithe of us all can appreciate the film's well thought out formula. This sort of comedy only works, I think, when everyone in the cast is capable of being funny, and director Todd Berger ensures this happens by giving everyone in the movie a role based on different stereotypical response to crises. Hence an hour and a half of laughing at a conspiracy theorist, a take-charge man, an in-denial woman and your expected "screw it all let's get high" crew, all try and coexist with the knowledge that they may only have a few hours to live. It all works really well, and the great thing is that movie doesn't even need to try that hard to be funny because the scenarios already are. In fact, the only thing that could really ruin a movie like this would be bad dialogue, but the writing is witty and sharp all the way through, resulting in one of the best endings to a film I've seen in awhile.


It's a Disaster is a funny, smirking sort of Dark Comedy, that would probably make you laugh even  in the midst of a real-life apocalyptic scenario. Perhaps its greatest strength is its ability to constantly quash its own predictability and offer up sumptuous surprises, which is no easy feat for any film and makes this money well spent.