Kill Your Friends

(Owen Harris/2015/UK) 

I don’t know what the book of the same name by John Niven is like; it was a best seller apparently, but this film is a mess. It just doesn’t know what it wants to be. It starts as an acidic take on the music business but a lot of the humour is neither as incisive nor witty as the rapid fire voiceover would have you believe. Nick Hoult’s character Steven is a deliberately repugnant and smarmy twat so when he kills his first pal it looks like it’s going to be a comedy of black humour following this A&R mans murderous ambition. It’s a good metaphor for the cut throat music industry and maybe this should have been the path followed but it starts taking itself too seriously. Things begin to come apart for Steven and he falls flat on his arse in a cocaine and alcohol binged descent into hell. The entire middle section goes off on this personal crisis, which is neither here nor there as he’s an unsympathetic character to begin with and Harris forgets to play it for laughs. Steven pulls himself together and starts back stabbing work mates and climbing to the top again. There is another murder but for a film called Kill Your Friends you can’t help feeling a bit short changed at two killings. By the time our hero has established himself as the king of A&R it’s hard to care about anything or anyone you’ve just seen onscreen. Everyone in the film is purposefully reprehensible with few redeeming qualities, I get it, the music business is scummy and we’re poking fun at it but the humour is second rate and the tonal shift from comedy to dark personal hell doesn’t work before trying to claw back the satirical punch line at the end. It’s really just a waste of time.

(1/5)