Death to 2020
The start of this vile decade has gotten humanity off on the wrong foot. Audiences know that; the constant swirling newsfeed makes it abundantly clear that the only way is down, in stark contradiction to Yazz’s late 80s pop-song prediction. Death to 2020, helmed by the writers that brought you underwhelming pockets of technological hatred in Black Mirror, is an ode to the year that shifted the way of life and general convictions. All in all, not a good year and not a good film either, this brief mockumentary concocted by Charlie Brooker slumps onto Netflix with little build-up behind it.
Coasting along on the strong name-branding of its cast and director, Death to 2020 is a feeble replacement for the usual end-of-year Brooker escapades. Yearly Wipe this is not. Laurence Fishburne provides narration tailor-made for Brooker’s cheery sadism. All the usual music cues, writing styles and pragmatics of his work can be found within but are lacking entirely. Performances simply aren’t up to scratch, and Samuel L. Jackson and Cristin Milioti turn in supporting roles that are ineffective, to say the least. Kumail Nanjiani and Lisa Kudrow also appear, and the key similarity between all these cast members is that they play broadly cliché caricatures of the real world. Kudrow represents fake news, Jackson the free press. Brooker never dives deeper than a couple soundbites of relative humour.
Frustrating it may be to see exceptionally funny dialogue go to waste – it’s the performances that waste them. Hugh Grant is solid, playing a historian, but the joke here seems solely to be that Grant is playing a role so far removed from his glory days. Audiences had a taste of that with The Gentlemen, and all Death to 2020 can do is showcase a versatile range for Grant and his apt ability to ease himself into any role is a testament to his craft. But what does the film gain from this? Absolutely nothing – a couple lines worthy of a chuckle, but ultimately futile in its rabid push for changes to an exceptionally brilliant formula. The evolution of Brooker’s work from couch-bound critic to mockumentary overseer is a poor leap that offers nothing but negatives.
Not shaking itself from the glory days of Brooker’s scathing sarcasm found on the BBC, Death to 2020 tries its hand at a series of fictional characters chatting about real-world events. The same pacing and identical efforts in the writing make for pockets of decency, but Brooker’s lack of physical presence is a tremendous loss – his presentation sold the Wipe series. In fact, it’d be difficult to present his comedic work without him in the foreground, as Death to 2020 hopefully realises. An authorial voice shines through, but its impact is minimal, unlike the harrowing year it wishes to analyse.