Sunday, March 27, 2016

Kill Your Friends 2016 Review

 
Lies. Betrayal. Murder. Just another day at the office” [1]. That‘s the tagline for this dark comedy neo-noir crime thriller, which is based on a screenplay written by John Niven. It is based upon a book with the same title that was written by Niven in 2008 and he used some of his experiences during his brief career in the music industry. The novel has been described as being one of the best British novels since Trainspotting was released. The film is a starring vehicle for Nicholas Hoult, who has gained a name for himself from his appearances in Warm Bodies, the new X-Men trilogy as the character Beast, and also in Mad Max: Fury Road as Nux.
Hoult stars as Steven Stelfox, a twenty-seven-year old A&R man working for London Records in 1997 during the big Britpop music craze when Oasis and Muse debuted. He is fueled less on making good music as opposed to moving up the career ladder, with the goal to be the head of the A&R department. Stelfox is the personification of what we think the music industry is like, he is fueled and driven by his greed, cocaine, sex, alcohol, and the party lifestyle. He doesn’t even care about making good music or finding interesting bands, he just wants to get the next hit single that will help him get promoted. When the industry starts to change and he is going to get passed up for the promotion that he wants, he sets out to kill the coworkers that are standing in his way. Without giving anything else away plot wise, there is no limit to what he’s willing to do in order to advance his career.
This film has been compared to American Psycho and Filth because of the main characters in all three of these are psychotic in some way, and yet we end up being really intrigued by them. Some reviews have said that Stelfox is just a straight rip off of the characters Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) and Bruce (James McAvoy). While they are all three psychotic and also all were originally created in novels first, there are differences in all three characters and their stories. Bateman lives a very wealthy lifestyle as an investment banker, but his violence and murders are more about his enjoyment in the acts of killing someone. It may have started out as rage over a coworker’s business card being more lavish and then evolved into more of a fantasy fulfillment.
 
Bruce is a detective that has a borderline personality disorder and is bipolar, who spends most of his time indulging in the excesses of drugs, alcohol, sex, and trying to turn his colleagues against each other. His wife and kid have left him and he feels like the promotion is the one thing that will bring them back. He ends up screwing up a murder investigation and is discovered to have been cross-dressing pretending to be his wife, which leads to a demotion. Bruce never kills anyone; it’s his reckless lifestyle and mental illnesses that end up bringing him down. Without giving much away to both of these movies, neither character ends up winning in the end. The major differences between both of them and Stelfox is that he kills people solely to improve his job status and he kind of makes out a lot better than the other two do in the end.
This isn’t going to go down as the best movie from 2016, but it may be considered one of the most underrated and end up becoming a cult film. The dark themes instantly make it one that is going to be somewhat controversial and will only have a certain niche audience, there is enough violence, nudity, and murder in it to turn some people away. Two things stand out though; Nicholas Hoult and the music. Hoult is a star and he is thoroughly engaging as this character, while narrating the story and occasionally breaking the fourth wall. Like Tom Hardy, this is the type of actor that you expect to be good in everything and want to seek out movies that he is in. The other thing that really stands out is the music, which is a mix of mostly popular British music from that time period including Blur, the Chemical Brothers, Oasis, and Prodigy.
If you liked American Psycho, Filth, or anything that Nicholas Hoult has been in then you should definitely check this one out. If I had to actually give a rating, then I’d say somewhere around 3.5 out of 4 stars. But that rating could also mean my sanity level is not all that there. So just as a warning, some of you may find this movie offensive and totally unredeemable.   

Works Cited


[1]
"IMDB," IMDB, 28 3 2016. [Online]. Available: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2474958/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1. [Accessed 28 3 2016].
 
 
 


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