Film reviews: Kill Your Friends | He Named Me Malala | The Closer We Get

He Named Me Malala

ALISTAIR Harkness reviews this week’s film releases, including the Nicholas Hoult-starring Kill Your Friends and Scottish drama The Closer We Get

Kill Your Friends (18) | Rating: **
Directed by Owen Harris | Starring Nicholas Hoult, Craig Roberts, James Corden, Edward Hogg, Georgia King

Perhaps there’s a great movie to be made about the final bacchanalian days of the pre-Napster music industry, but Kill Your Friends isn’t it.

Set at the height of Britpop, when CDs still sold millions and kept music-ignorant record company execs up to their eyeballs in cocaine, the film, directed by Brit TV graduate Owen Harris (Misfits, Black Mirror), lacks the production values or inventiveness to evoke the era with any authenticity and leaves Scottish author (and former A&R exec) John Niven’s script – adapted from his own 2009 novel of the same name – sounding flat and contrived in the mouths of an otherwise good cast.

Nicholas Hoult takes the lead as Steven Stelfox, a reprehensible A&R man desperate to find – or at least manufacture – the next big thing.

Laying out the venal machinations of the music industry with scabrous first person narration and ironic asides to the camera, Stelfox embarks on a murderous, drug-fuelled, expenses-abusing mission to secure the top A&R job at his company, using his vulpine nature to cover his tracks as he bumps off colleagues, brokers deals and tries to evade the suspicions of a detective (Edward Hogg) who dreams of a career as a songwriter.

This last plot point is the least convincing of all; the character is impossibly naïve and his inept investigation into the murder of Stelfox’s colleague (James Cordon) is too easily derailed by Stelfox making him believe he can have a career in the music biz. Consequently there’s no drama in watching Stelfox squirm under scrutiny, so the film concentrates on making the cut throat nature of the business literal.

This is hardly revelatory stuff, but unfortunately this is also the extent of the film’s satirical sophistication — save for a few pops at The Spice Girls, the faux earnestness of indie rock bands, and the undiscerning gullibility of the general record buying public.

That the film pretty much nicks its plot from American Psycho and Robert Altman’s Hollywood satire The Player doesn’t help matters, although depending on how generous you’re feeling an argument could perhaps be made that ripping off a couple of established cult classics is in keeping with the bandwagon-jumping nature of the protagonist, but that’s a stretch.

Too often the film just seems desperate to shock, piling on scenes of coke-snorting orgies and general debauchery as if no one has ever seen Scarface, The Wolf of Wall Street, or even Filth, the try-hard nature of which is most closely mirrored here.

The Closer We Get (PG) | Rating: ***

Directed by: Karen Guthrie