Friendship: A Review – Alas, Poor Yorick

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A cringe comedy that never coalesces and ends up being more incoherent than funny.

Friendship, written and directed by Andrew DeYoung and starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, is a black comedy about Craig (Robinson), a social oddball who desperately yearns to be best buddies with his cool male neighbor, Austin (Rudd).

Prior to Friendship hitting theatres last May, the word on the street was that this movie was going to be a big hit and would be so enormous that it would resurrect the decidedly dormant genre of film comedy. Hell, there was even talk of Oscar nominations for both Rudd and Robinson.

The insider buzz was pretty intense there for a while…but then the movie came and went with barely a whimper – making no dent in the box office and even lesser impact in the culture. I didn’t even see it in the theatre and only caught it this week now that it’s streaming on HBO Max, or MAX, or whatever the hell they are calling the HBO/Warner Brothers streaming site nowadays.

Friendship had a lot going for it prior to me seeing it. First off, I really like Paul Rudd and think he’s very good at most everything he does. Secondly, I like Tim Robinson and find him to be funny in small servings. Since Rudd and Robinson are the stars of the movie this seemed to be a good formula for me.

Then I saw Friendship…and I must report that it is a terribly frustrating viewing experience.

I must admit up front that there are few moments where I laughed out loud at the film…no small accomplishment. But overall, the movie is, from both a comedy and cinema perspective, both structurally unsound and consistently incoherent.

The film tells the story of Craig, a suburbanite middle manager at a marketing firm, who becomes socially infatuated by his neighbor Austin, who is the weatherman at the local tv station.

Austin is everything Craig wishes he were…handsome, adventurous and charismatic. At first the friendship between Craig and Austin is great…until Craig shows his true awkward colors…then things go awry and fast.

The incoherence of the film is both structural and tonal. For example, for a film like this to work, Craig must be the comedy and Austin needs to be the straight man. But here Rudd, at first, plays Austin like he is his whacky character from Anchorman. Rudd’s performance is much too broad for it to work in this specific role, and it undermines the entirety of the movie.

Robinson’s Craig is essentially saturated in flop-sweat from the jump, and he’s very good at cringe comedy, but an hour and forty minutes of cringe is tough to take even for me, someone who digs cringe comedy.

Other issues persist throughout, like not being clear about the characters. For example…is Austin married? Apparently he is, but that information is withheld for a good period of time and then thrown into the mix well beyond the character’s introduction.

The same is true for Craig’s son…a character that is poorly defined and nothing but intrusive throughout.

Some bits in the film work very well, but others make no sense or fall flat, or both. There are flashes of funny but then there are missed opportunities where a joke or gag is sitting there waiting to be grasped and is left dying on the vine.

I would say that Friendship is in some ways just an extended version of Robinson’s cringe comedy sketch show, I Think You Should Leave, but without the comedic crispness and character commitment. It is reminiscent of two other failed spurned buddy/neighbor comedies…the Jim Carrey vehicle The Cable Guy and John Belushi’s final film, Neighbors.

Ironically, considering that Friendship was in theatres at the time, I spent much of the spring re-watching a bunch of film comedies from the 2000s. I watched Wedding Crashers, 40-Year-Old Virgin, Anchorman, Superbad and Old School, all movies I saw in the theatre during their original release.

These movies are all funny but are also very flawed. Some are too-long, some are poorly pasted together and some are a bit too grating. But despite their flaws they are funny…and they all made money because of it.

Upon my re-watch of these movies, it became clear that the glory days of 2000’s film comedy dominating at the box office are NOT coming back. Part of the reason for that is that it’s just easier to wait to watch a comedy at home than go spend money to see it in the theatre. Comedy is not exactly cinematic so the need to see it on the big screen is no longer there so why not wait to watch at home?

Secondly, our culture has so neutered comedy that it essentially has lost all meaning. All of those movies are centered around the narrative of guys trying to get laid – something that is anathema in our current culture – so much so that it would be deemed predatory to attempt to do such a thing. I mean, if the suffocating limitations placed on comedy today would have been in place back in the 2000’s then we wouldn’t have gotten Wedding Crashers, 40-Year-Old Virgin, Anchorman, Superbad and Old School, because despite being rather broad comedies, their entire premises violate the strict cultural rules by which Hollywood now operates.

Friendship doesn’t violate our current cultural rules, and it also didn’t make any waves, any money, and also didn’t save the film comedy as a genre. Instead, it just highlighted the fact that the genre is dead as a doornail, and nobody is going to raise it from its eternal slumber anytime soon, if ever.

Ultimately, Friendship is a benign, at times mildly amusing, rather tepid comedy that overall is much more miss than it is hit. It’s the type of movie you watch at home without actually watching it. It is, at best, background noise.

Truth is, if you’re looking for a mild chuckle, you’d be much better served just streaming an episode or two of I Think You Need to Leave than sitting down and enduring the relentless sub-mediocrity that is Friendship for an hour and forty minutes.

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