Kill Your Friends
Don't Go! A nauseating, failed attempt to shock and awe.
Obnoxious music exec gets murderous.
Were the nineties a good time for British music? The Britpop clangs of Blur, Oasis, Pulp and Supergrass would suggest so. On the other hand, the sugary strains of the Spice Girls, Aqua, Robson & Jerome and B*witched make a big argument for the opposite. Kill Your Friends whisks us back into the giddiness of the industry which surrounded that music. Will we refrain from looking back in anger? Or shall we slam our bodies down and wind it all around again? Sadly, the answer this time is a resounding zig-a-zig-nah.
Based on the 2008 novel by John Niven (and with a script written by the author), Kill Your Friends features Steven Stelfox (Nicholas Hoult; X-Men: Days of Future Past, Mad Max: Fury Road) - a twenty-something A&R man at a cut-throat, London record label where jobs are ended as suddenly as a one-hit-wonder drops out of the charts. In the face of failure and in order to advance his career by scrabbling up the filthy, jagged cliff-face of the music industry to become Head of A&R, Stelfox starts (literally) murdering the competition.
Based on the 2008 novel by John Niven (and with a script written by the author), Kill Your Friends features Steven Stelfox (Nicholas Hoult; X-Men: Days of Future Past, Mad Max: Fury Road) - a twenty-something A&R man at a cut-throat, London record label where jobs are ended as suddenly as a one-hit-wonder drops out of the charts. In the face of failure and in order to advance his career by scrabbling up the filthy, jagged cliff-face of the music industry to become Head of A&R, Stelfox starts (literally) murdering the competition.
There is plenty of energy in the film. Right from the outset, the thumping bass of nineties music throbs under the moody internal narrative of Stelfox as he sets out his misanthropic principles of life. With the energy comes promise, possibility, anticipation. But as the film (supposedly a black, satirical "comedy") stumbles through its hour and forty minute running time, it all dissipates into an unpleasant, unintelligent spew of dull, misogynistic, drug-fuelled noise; with dastardly men charging pointlessly and predictably towards a goal that seems to have no value to them in the first place.
Comparisons have been made with American Psycho, the Christian Bale-led millennial film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' controversial novel. There are some similarities - men driven to murder by a need to succeed in their jobs - but in terms of quality and quantity, the two films are miles apart. American Psycho wittily uses the twisted mind of a charismatic man to question the consumerist, sexed-up culture of the eighties and its inevitable futility. Kill Your Friends features an equally uncharismatic, strung-out drone, whose biggest contribution to the philosophical landscape is the theory that up to 60% of all nouns are replaceable with a c-word. Faux-profound, vulgar phrases such as, "success is a gangbang" (which it isn't*), that litter the voice-over monologue of the film don't help Kill Your Friends much either. Also, if you were ever wondering how many asinine jokes about cancer, aids, prolific cocaine abuse and disability is too many for one film, the answer is in Kill Your Friends.
Part of the issue is that - even if the script and storyline were workable - Nicholas Hoult hasn't yet developed the unflinching animalistic magnetism that is required to carry a disagreeable character like Stelfox. He has of course come a long way from the schoolboy with a bowl cut in About a Boy (2002), but apparently not so far as making an obnoxious murderer seem in any way appealing. James Corden as Hoult's pitiful drug-drenched colleague is more appropriately cast, but again plays such an unpleasant character that little is gained from his involvement. Add this to a storyline which insists that the aim of becoming an A&R head - which is not portrayed as having any particularly great financial, social or professional rewards - is sufficient motivation for a snide, weak character to begin a killing spree that he clearly lacks the guile to pull off, and all hope for the film (and at times humanity in general) is virtually gone. None of it holds together.
So don't go. Like no Mercy's 1996 mega hit "Where Do You Go", some things are best left in the nineties.
*As we all know, success is 3 unglamorous minutes of missionary.
So don't go. Like no Mercy's 1996 mega hit "Where Do You Go", some things are best left in the nineties.
*As we all know, success is 3 unglamorous minutes of missionary.
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