Leonardo DiCaprio Finally Does Comedy in Don’t Look Up Trailer, It’s Glorious

You know Adam McKay’s new movie, Don’t Look Up, is such a welcome delight.

To  be sure, the comedy, which will be released on Netflix in time for Christmas, has plenty going for it beyond DiCaprio visibly reaching for the yucks. After all, this is a (dark) McKay comedy, and the first full-on one the now Oscar winning filmmaker has made since his pair of tragic dramedies based on real world horrors: the implosion of the housing market on Wall Street in Vice. Before those films, McKay was primarily known as the behind-the-camera partner-in-crime of Will Ferrell on films like Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and Step Brothers.

Additionally, the film marks Silver Linings Playbook.

Yet the image that many viewers will take away from the teaser? It’s of Leonardo DiCaprio breathing heavily and failing to prevent a panic attack as he deals with the pitch black gallows humor of the movie’s premise: A pair of scientists have discovered a comet is about to eradicate all life on Earth and most Americans either don’t care or believe them. The fact that this idea was penned before the COVID-19 pandemic hit seems depressingly prescient.

So expect Don’t Look Up to maintain the sharpened elbows of McKay’s more recent true story riffs. Even so, it’ll certainly allow DiCaprio to stretch muscles we’ve only seen hinted at to memorable effect in recent work, including perhaps most notably his last film: Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.

With the exception of an early stint at the start of his career on television sitcoms, DiCaprio has gravitated time and again toward the dramatic and seriously harrowing. Sorrowful might even be the way to describe the fate of a variety of his protagonists, from Romeo + Juliet to his Oscar win in The Revenant, with all the doomed heroes he played in between via Titanic, The Aviator, The Departed, and Shutter Island (to name but a few). Yet the charismatic performer has undeniably shown a penchant for the type of pointed line reading, and the big physical gambles that on-screen belly laughs are made of.

DiCaprio’s brilliantly awkward dance moves in Martin Scorsese and Tarantino ts as pseudo-dark comedies, but DiCaprio plays such unrepentant and cruel bastards in those movies that it’s impossible to not walk away and be rightfully despising those characters.

Yet a movie where we can laugh with, or at least at, one of his creations? Again, only after winning his Oscar in 2016 has the thespian seemed to let his proverbial hair down, first in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time and now in Don’t Look Up. There is, indeed, much to snicker about DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton in OUATIH, from the way he threatens to blow his own brains out during a drunken self-pity party in his trailer to how he’ll cry after a little girl tells him he really is a good actor. But at the end of the day, a film which plugs into the real-life horrors of the Sharon Tate murders can never be anything less than bittersweet.

So bring on a McKay laugher where DiCaprio can play one of the filmmakers’ many patented privileged white male douchebags with the fragility of a Ron Burgundy or Ricky Bobby! Let him and Lawrence improv like it’s bedtime at Brennan and Dale’s house in Step Brothers! Let these actors have fun. We certainly will.