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Critics Consensus: Kill Your Friends takes futile stabs at black comedy, all strangled by a glut of tonal jumbles, bad casting, and unremittingly unlikable characters.
Critic Consensus: Kill Your Friends takes futile stabs at black comedy, all strangled by a glut of tonal jumbles, bad casting, and unremittingly unlikable characters.
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All Critics (57) | Top Critics (9) | Fresh (14) | Rotten (43) | DVD (1)
Everyone is horrible all the time-so when they do horrible things to each other, the result is a chuckle rather than a vicious bite. The music business is cutthroat, we get it.
"Kill Your Friends" goes to some ugly places, but it keeps a sturdy sense of rhythm.
Watching "Kill Your Friends" unfold is not dissimilar to being at a party where someone's clever one-liner lulls you into a conversation that reveals a bitterly immature, dismissively one-note lout, after which you're trapped.
Anchoring the pungent 1990s ambience is Mr. Hoult, easily oozing cool charisma.
Though the script is full of arch, darkly funny observations, the movie gets stuck on the same clanging chord of all-hating cynicism.
A more disagreeable collection of cynical, backstabbing, self-aggrandizing, shallow, vicious and vile specimens of humanity gathered together in a single motion picture would be difficult to conceive of.
A would-be blacker-than-black comedy that is so misconceived and so wretchedly executed that I have no trouble in putting it down as one of the most unpleasant afternoons I've ever spent in the cinema.
Hoult is a fine actor for sure but he's just too damn good-looking and smooth as the dark-hearted record company man. Hoult's craven A&R man has the killer instinct but his insecurities never seem entirely convincing.
Saturates itself in nihilistic excess while presenting an uncompromisingly grim portrait of the recording industry. What is has to say, however, eventually grows stale as its narrative repetitively hits the same beats again and again.
As adapted by screenwriter John Niven from his own novel, Kill Your Friends has a decidedly been-there, killed-that feel to it.
Nicholas Hoult shines in this blackest of black comedies.
The cynical film might be more annoying than eyeopening but the soundtrack kicks, as it features groups like Blur, Oasis and Radiohead.
Badly written and filled with hateful characters, it's a juvenile facsimile of American Psycho.
Super Reviewer
All bark, no bite.
A nasty individual does the classic bad guy monologuing ... for the length of the film. It's about the cutthroat record business in London (ha ha). Starts cleverly enough but loses steam in the middle. There's a girl band send-up that could've been milked more.
I liked this story a lot more when it was called American Psycho - come on, let's face it, the comparison is inevitable -, but still, even if it starts to be predictable and lose gas after halfway through, this is a decent, darkly humored film centered on a rotten character.
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