Main cast: Theo James (Will), Kat Graham (Sam), Forest Whitaker (Tom), Nicole Ari Parker (Paula), Grace Dove (Ricki), Mark O’Brien (Jeremiah), Kerry Bishé (Meg), and Eric Keenleyside (Sheriff Reynolds)
Director: David M Rosenthal

Don’t be fooled by the dramatic movie poster like I was when I was flicking through the Netflix catalogue looking for something to watch – How It Ends is not a movie with a lot of gunfu. It’s a tale of some morons trying to make it from Chicago to Seattle shortly after the world experiences a cataclysmic earthquake that threatens to destroy all life as we know it. While this sounds fun, well…

Will and Sam are in love, so our hero flies off to visit her parents in order to ask for their permission to marry Sam. Alas, Sam’s father Tom is a douchenozzle who doesn’t want anyone to marry his daughter, and the two men fight. Will decides to leave in a huff, never telling Tom that he has knocked up Sam. Hmm, I’d think that would be a thing he could say to get Tom to agree, but hey, maybe Will is too much of a gentleman.

Then the world goes to hell. I’m still not sure what happened, as this movie doesn’t dwell too much on the reasons – it is more interested in throwing me clichéd zombie movie tropes like how humans are their worst enemies when crap hits the fun. Will and Tom decide to drive to Seattle to look for Sam, and that’s when the fun begins.

Wait, did I say “fun”? How It Ends doesn’t break any new grounds – people who have watched any zombie movie or have played dystopian video games like Fallout will be familiar with the many “humans are garbage” twists and turns that are thrown at Will and Tom. The problem here is that, no matter how many times they get violated in the rear end, our nimrods will keep falling for the same trick over and over. Even as people try to kill them, they are trying their best to help those arseholes, or worse, feel very guilty about accidentally killing those who try to kill them first to the point of doing the martyr dance. Any sympathy I may have for them evaporates shortly into the movie as these morons cross the line from full-on desperation to brainpower degeneration.

Then there’s the final act, which just has to tack on an eye-rolling confrontation out of nowhere, and then there is that ending. Seriously, what is with that half, no quarter-arsed ending? It’s like they were filming this thing as a mini-series for Netflix, only to run out of money shortly after, and had an unpaid intern do up the ending in a pirated software so that they can still sell it to Netflix, this time as a movie.

Is the title of the movie a middle finger of sorts? With a title like How It Ends, this movie has to be trolling those unfortunate enough to have wasted their time sitting through this thing.