Kill Your Friends

 

KILL YOUR FRIENDS

Director : Owen Harris
Year : 2015
Genre : Black comedy
Rating : **1/2

 

Nicholas Hoult stars as the most unlikable character of the year in 'Kill Your Friends', a brutal yet completely soulless adaptation of John Niven's acerbic and highly controversial 2008 novel of the same name. Set during the meteoric rise of Britpop in the 90's, 'Kill Your Friends' focuses on the story of Hoult's vile record producer Stephen Stelfox - an ambitious yet thoroughly reprehensible scumbag whose lust for money and fortune is only matched by his lust for drugs and drink. As he proved in 'Mad Max : Fury Road', Nicholas Hoult is an actor of great talent and depth but even he finds it hard to find any humour or empathy in the character of Stelfox or the script which is chock a block full of nasty one-liners about the Holocaust, AIDS and domestic abuse. At times, 'Kill Your Friends' exhibits the cult potential of Mary Harron's 'American Psycho' but the direction from Owen Harris lacks the edge or visual wit that made that film the massive success it was and instead leaves us with a roster of disgracefully hateful archetypes and moments of downright depressing hedonism and violence. 'Kill Your Friends' may be at points delightfully dark but for the most part it is a humourless and mean-spirited picture that tries to dilute it's relentlessly horrid subject matter with forced postmodern dialogue and knowing jabs at the current state of the music industry without really having much to say at all.