Kill Your Friends **½ (2015, Nicholas Hoult, Craig Roberts, Tom Riley, Georgia King, James Corden, Jim Piddock) – Movie Review

Director Owen Harris’s British pitch-dark comedy crime-thriller film overall must be judged a missed opportunity and a misfire. But it comes out firing on all barrels and certainly has its attractions and laughs.

Alas, there are problems with the tone, dialogue and developments in the script written by John Niven based on his own written 2008 novel of the same name. This gives a bunch of good, hard-working actors like Nicholas Hoult, Craig Roberts, Tom Riley, Georgia King, James Corden and Jim Piddock a lot of trouble.

Hoult stars as 27-year-old A&R man Steven Stelfox, who is burning his way through the booming British music business in London in 1997. Overlooked for an expected promotion, he takes the concept of killer tunes to a literal level to salvage his career. Exit James Corden as Waters, which is a shame as he’s not at all bad.

Once the film gets full on into American Psycho territory like this, it stuffs itself, and Hoult can’t keep control of the big star role or maintain the needed sympathy for his character which becomes way too extreme for comfort and fun entertainment. It’s not Hoult’s fault. He’s game for anything. Though he does seem basically too nice for this kind of role.

As a satire of the music industry, big business, greed, incompetence, ignorance, stupidity or corporate climbing, it’s very obvious, so it’s best hope was to keep to the black-comedy How to Succeed in Business thing. If you compare it to the movie of American Psycho or The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), it’s a pale shadow of a letdown. Christina Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio really inhabited these extreme, nasty characters, but they had excellent movies to do it in.

It’s a shame about Kill Your Friends though, because it has lots of promise and potential and the first half of the movie is rather good and rather funny. Hoult’s a brave and excellent actor and it’s maybe worth it for him. Jim Piddock too makes some headway as horrible Derek Sommers, the managing director of Hoult’s record label.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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