Kill Your Friends
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Kill Your Friends

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Taking heaped buckets of inspiration from Patrick Bateman, Nicholas Hoult plays coked out ’90s A&R man Steven Stelfox in Kill Your Friends, based on the novel of the same name by John Niven, which takes inspiration from his own experiences as an A&R man. In a megalomaniacal effort to become the head of A&R at the record label he works at, Stelfox engages in the most sordid of sabotages and, of course, the titular colleague murdering. What initially promises to be an incisive, fresh and funny take on the distasteful psychopath protagonist film (a la The Wolf of Wall Street and American Psycho) derails hard and fast, ruining a lot of the hard work Kill Your Friends does in the first two acts.

Hoult is at his best when he plays a jerk: Skins was never the same after Tony got hit by that bus. The same rings true for his rich portrayal of the abhorrent Stelfox, whose hatred of music is matched only by his bloodthirsty desire to squash his rivals and ascend to power. Hoult’s face is glued into a sneer at all times, and his delivery is tipped with the appropriate amount of bile and exasperation as he deals with his contemporaries and artists. He breaks the fourth wall and narrates each scene with an enjoyable sense of loathing and disregard for anybody else. Kill Your Friends begins to crumble, however, when Stelfox’s narration begins to grate, signifying the beginning of a tiresome end for the film, which devolves into aimless violent satire that no longer feels new or exciting. Misogynistic jokes or punch lines about HIV and child pornography are nowhere near as edgy as director Owen Harris (The Gamechangers, a Black Mirror episode) wants them to be. There’s a limit to how many times watching someone do a line can be interesting, and that limit gets smaller and smaller with each of these ‘questionable protagonist’ movies we’re exposed to.

Thankfully, the characters of Kill Your Friends are enough to keep things interesting despite some lacklustre writing: Stelfox suffers mostly from lazy plot development than by virtue of Hoult’s acting. Late Late Show host James Corden plays Stelfox’s cocaine addled peer, who resembles a dropkick version of James Murphy, and relative newcomer Craig Roberts (Submarine) has an enjoyable turn as Stelfox’s naïve protégé. While Kill Your Friends might win an award for best use of a Prodigy song in a murder scene, most everything else in the film develops predictably; when it doesn’t, it’s not to the films advantage. There’s probably a whole realm of struggling music industry man-children for whom this film will become what The Wolf of Wall Street is to Commerce Uni Ball attendees, but for the rest of us, just don’t come seeking the next American Psycho, because you won’t find it here.

BY ALI SCHNABEL