Friendship

“Tami” (Kate Mara) is recovering from cancer, needs a bigger van for her flourishing florist business, kisses her teenage son on the lips, and is married to advertising executive “Craig” (Tim Robinson). He is a fastidious gent, usually clad in beige, who keeps himself to himself and is largely derided by his workmates as being a bit of a drip. They are looking to move house when they get a parcel for an address nearby. “Craig” is an helpful sort of fella and so takes it round to “Austin” (Paul Rudd). He is a local television weatherman who invites his new neighbour for a drink that evening. The two hit it off fairly swiftly, and next thing they are crawling around the sewers under City Hall having an adventure! For a few days they are as thick as thieves, then one evening doesn’t go so well for “Craig” when “Austin” has friends over and next thing that burgeoning rapport isn’t what it was. Meantime, “Tami” is spending a little more time with trainer “Devon” and their son “Stevie” has got himself a sleepover partner. Increasingly adrift, “Craig” tries to reconstruct his recent adventure with his wife, but that doesn’t go remotely to plan and merely leaves this man even more alone, ridiculed, exposed and with a wife who appears to have abandoned him. What’s the point of all of this? Well that’s a good question. Robinson excels here as an almost cartoon character epitomising just about everything inept that makes you cringe. Is that funny or is it uncomfortable or both? Well I just found it the latter, and as this story of family rather cynically unravels before us I found his characterisation quirky to start with but increasingly annoying, Chaplin-esque even, and I started not to care what happened to any of them. Is she having an affair? Does she want to? Is she just chronically unfulfilled with her lumbering husband? And then there’s “Austin”. Is he just a selfish and nasty piece of work or has he offered the hand of friendship to someone then hastily decided it was a mistake and time for the drawbridge to come up? It is the kind of film that has you shifting in your seat, and that’s fine, providing that you can have some degree of empathy with someone on screen. I just didn’t, and as the conclusion loomed I just felt indifferent to them, their scenario and to those irritating weather “personalities” that American television channels seem obsessed with, but that the rest of the world has never employed. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood, and there were people adjacent in the cinema laughing out loud, but for me it just didn’t work and showed a side of human behaviour you’d laugh at rather than with, and I didn’t care for that either.

Funny and hard to watch at times, due to how many horrible decisions Tim Robinson's character makes, but it was really quite good. Like a long "I Think You Should Leave" skit. Make friends with this ham while it is on your face!

This is good. It was over-hyped to me. Way over-hyped. It's good to have friends. It's fun. Drags in the middle. Fun again.

This is good. It was over-hyped to me. Way over-hyped. It's good to have friends. It's fun. Drags in the middle. Fun again.

I truly admire the offbeat and outrageous when it comes to movie comedies. At the same time, though, I’m also the first one to take pictures to task that allegedly aspire to these qualities and utterly fail horrendously. Such is the case with this debut feature from writer-director Andrew DeYoung, a supposedly subversive, allegedly hilarious look at the subject of male bonding that falls positively flat at every juncture. “Friendship” follows the ridiculously implausible adventures of neighbors Austin (Paul Rudd) and Craig (Tim Robinson), whose juvenile, irresponsible antics are so completely unfathomable that any viewer with even the smallest modicum of intelligence can’t possibly begin to take any of this nonsense seriously. Their episodic story plays like a live action version of Family Guy or Beavis and Butthead, vehicles that may be fine for animation but that can’t cut it in a legitimate cinematic format. I honestly could not wait for the closing credits to roll on this one, checking my watch constantly as I struggled to sit through this painful, misguided attempt at poking fun at bromances, making seemingly well-balanced men look like brain-dead morons. Given that, it’s mind-boggling how this project ever got the green light and even more baffling at the undeserved gushing love letters that have been sent its way. The honors it has received also genuinely stretch credibility beyond all reasonable limits, including a Critics Choice Award nomination for best comedy (ironic considering that its inherent stupidity is not the least bit funny), an Independent Spirit Award nod for best first screenplay (easily the picture’s weakest attribute) and a National Board of Review designation as one of 2025’s Top 10 Independent Films. Indeed, if this celluloid trainwreck is any indication of the current state of movie comedies, the industry is in bigger trouble than any of us can possibly imagine.