DEATH TO 2020
Al Campbell, Alice Mathias (2020)
3 STARS
The metaphorical body of 2020 is still warm and this film is already poking fun at it. Death to 2020 ponders the downs, and further downs, of the year we couldn’t wait to leave behind.
The acting talent on display here is impressive in itself as the likes of Samuel L. Jackson and Lisa Kudrow walk us through the events of the year. In particular, Hugh Grant as a bigoted historian and Cristin Milioti as a racist Q-anon follower bring genuine hilarity to the narrative.
The issue that this mockumentary has, is that it’s just too fresh. The film discusses these events as if they were isolated occurrences that can’t transcend arbitrary, yearly, boundaries. As though racism and corona virus don’t care that planet Earth has made another trip around the Sun. The facts are; America is still a tragically polarised state, Boris Johnson still has no business governing a country, we are still destroying our planet with global warming.
As far as cinema goes, this doesn’t offer much to the medium but Death to 2020 still provides a fun, lighthearted, recap of an awful year. Enjoy it as the joke it is intended to be and, maybe in ten years, we can re-watch it and the wounds may be, at least in part, healed.