TMW#71: Friendship, Smurfs and Harvest reviewed
Plus the week's biggest new trailers
Enjoy this week’s review round-up featuring cringe comedy, folk horror and the bluest villagers this side of Avatar: Fire and Ash. As ever, your generosity with the like/share/subscribe buttons is appreciated, and let us know what you see this weekend… We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday!
Friendship
15, in cinemas now
⭐⭐⭐☆☆
While broad comparisons can be made to other films - on paper, at least, there’s a connection to The Banshees of Inisherin and the unilateral ending of a platonic male relationship - Friendship isn’t really like anything else. It’s definitely a comedy, but one so dark and cringe-inducing as to leave you permanently on edge.
It’s built around the screen persona of Tim Robinson, a former Saturday Night Live regular best known for his Netflix sketch series, I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson. If you’re familiar with that show, you’ll know that Robinson has an unhinged intensity that makes early-period Will Ferrell look like late-period Will Ferrell. While he plays different characters across the various skits, they often revolve around him having meltdowns in social situations that ratchet up to a surreal level of awkwardness. Like all sketch shows, the quality fluctuates, but at its best, it’s incredible (this critic has at times been doubled over in genuine physical pain from laughing so hard at it).
It would be impossible to maintain that energy over feature length, so Friendship sensibly takes a slower-burn approach to plotting and Robinson’s performance. He plays Craig (trigger warning for UK viewers who have to accept the pronunciation ‘Creg’ for 101 mins), a socially awkward office worker at a tech firm that makes apps more addictive. His wife Tami (Kate Mara, nailing the tightrope tone) has recently recovered from cancer, and encourages Craig to hang out with their new neighbour, Austin.
Craig’s almost instantly man-crush smitten with Austin, and it’s not hard to blame him: not only is Austin played by Paul Rudd, but he’s full of cool mantras, doesn’t carry a mobile phone, rocks out in a local band, and knows his way around the neighbourhood’s secret tunnels. (If there are shades of I Love You, Man in the set-up, there’s also a little Anchorman - Rudd’s smarmy, moustachioed alpha is a local weatherman). When Craig’s behaviour one night cuts this bromance short, a period of obsession follows.
At its best, Friendship is hysterically funny, be the punchline misdirection of a physical pratfall that’s in the vein of top-tier Simpsons, or simply finding absurdly subtle humour in small details (one minor side joke about where Craig gets all of his clothes from is stupidly funny). There’s also a superb drug trip sequence that has fun with (what’s presumably) product placement.
While the humour inevitably won’t be for everyone (particularly those with low cringe tolerance), it’s an admirably bold undertaking. Writer/director Andrew DeYoung has plenty of TV experience (Our Flag Means Death, PEN15), but this is his feature debut as writer/director. There’s no denying it’s a big swing, with an impressively controlled tone. The soundtrack is largely sinister synths and choral chanting. It feels like it’s within striking distance of being a modern comedy great, but falls just short due to a couple of saggy patches, and the need for a more consistent delivery of big laughs.
Some of the funniest moments feel like isolated interludes grafted on to the overarching narrative, and there are interesting ideas that don’t get chance to develop. Any commentary on the fragility of male friendships feels surface level, with some revelations about Rudd’s character not amounting to much, while Craig’s relationships with Tami and their son (Jack Dylan Grazer) can feel like they spin their wheels.
Robinson’s strong flavour of comedy was always going to result in a film best described as an acquired taste, although the slight lulls are worth bearing for the highs. But in friendships terms, its more of a memorable hang than a pal for life. (Matt Maytum)
IN SHORT: An excruciating cringe-com with plenty of rewards for those on its wavelength.
STAY FOR THE END CREDITS? Nothing to see here.
NO SPOILERS: Craig has a rageful aversion to Marvel spoilers: a meta joke aimed at Ant-Man star Rudd? Or is it simply impossible these days for a film to not feature an MCU alumnus somewhere in its ranks?
Smurfs
U, in cinemas now
⭐☆☆☆☆
Perhaps the most impressive, in inverted commas, thing about the new Smurfs movie is how it fails to clear even the low bar set by the three previous big-studio takes on the blue Belgian critters. Following 2017’s The Lost Village, the mantle has now been passed to a different big studio - but hopes of a fresh dawn are jeopardised early doors by some expository guff about magic books that resembles a CBeebies Bedtime Story read by Thanos. While the unwanted addition of multiversal mythology to the Smurfs’ simple world seems inspired by the MCU, the animation offers a particularly weedy variant of the painterly 3D style that’s become ubiquitous post-Spider-Verse. A handful of hybrid scenes, in the vein of the first two Sony Smurfs movies, have an equally flat, stock-footage feel.
True, a few relatively more successful visual flourishes do creep in at the 11th hour, but too late to redeem a story as lacklustre as one of its main characters, the mopey No-Name Smurf (voiced by James Corden), who pines for a personality. His co-lead is Smurfette (played by Rihanna, in case the blizzard of billboards and bus ads weren’t clear), with whom he (plus a few other no-mark mates) embarks on a mission to rescue Papa Smurf (John Goodman) from the clutches of regular nemesis Gargamel’s brother Razamel (both wizards are voiced by JP Karliak, as if emphasising the point that the characters are virtually identical).
Despite Rihanna’s presence being the big hook, she only performs one new song (the OK-ish ‘Friend of Mine’). There are substantially more life lessons, though: be yourself, believe in yourself, we’re stronger when we work together, blah blah blah… none of which is conveyed with much conviction, originality or nuance. And as you might expect, you can count the number of laughs on one mitten. One involves some bleeped-out bad language; grown-ups’ own curses will surely be all too audible. (Matthew Leyland)
STAY FOR THE END CREDITS? If the cinema’s a bit stuffy, watch the mid-credit threat of a sequel and feel your blood turn instantly cold.
Harvest
18, in cinemas now; on Mubi from 8 August
⭐⭐☆☆☆
Opening shots of a man chomping a log and tonguing a tree trunk suggest this won’t be your typical tale of life in the countryside. And so it proves, though similarly striking moments are spread disappointingly thin over the course of a slow-going 134 minutes. Our bark-botherer is Walter (Caleb Landry Jones), a townsman-turned-farmer in a nameless Scottish village in an unspecified pre-industrial time. He loves the land (clearly), but is uncomfortable with the rough justice served to outsiders, as well as the hiring of a map-maker (Arinzé Kene) whose work symbolises the insidious labelling and possession of nature by unscrupulous forces. The latter is most vividly represented by pitiless estate owner Jordan (Frank Dillane) - a bit of a panto villain, admittedly, but his icy dynamism throws into sharp relief Walter’s enervating passivity. At its best, Harvest echoes the folk-horror unease of the likes of The Witch, Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man; if only it had the characters, drama and narrative propulsion to match those films - or indeed its own grainy, dirt-under-the-fingernails atmospherics. (Matthew Leyland)
TALKING POINT: Harvest is the English-language debut of Athina Rachel Tsangari, the Greek auteur who directed 2010’s Attenberg and produced a number of Yorgos Lanthimos’ early works, including Dogtooth (2009).
Trailer Club
The first trailer for Luca Guadagnino’s new film features a ticking noise that increasingly sounds like something a lot more ominous than a clock. The atmosphere’s tense enough in the opening moments of heated generational debate, before reaching a flashpoint as Ayo Edebiri’s brilliant college student reveals to professor Julia Roberts that the latter’s colleague (played by Andrew Garfield) has “crossed the line”... Then it emerges Roberts’ character has her own dark secrets (throwing things hauntedly into the fireplace: always a dead giveaway). The eye-catching cast also includes Guadagnino regulars Chloë Sevigny and Michael Stuhlbarg; after period piece Queer, this is the auteur’s return to very-much-contemporary drama.
Hawkins is going to hell in the trailer for the fifth and final season of Stranger Things… although newbie Linda Hamilton is packing heat, so we’re not too worried.
Not a Stranger Things spin-off, Pixar’s handsome-looking Hoppers seems set to give us the best beaver gags since The Naked Gun…
Grindhouse vibes all round in the trailer for ‘Uncaged Fury’, a fake-movie promo for Mortal Kombat II…
…and here’s the genuine article.
On the heels of Heads of State comes another PM-in-jeopardy thriller in the shape of Suranne Jones starrer Hostage, a Netflix series which looks mildly more serious than the Elba/Cena actioner…
Hawaii’s turn-of-the-19th-century unification is captured in Apple TV+ miniseries Chief of War, co-created by Jason Momoa who also exec-produces and stars. No word yet on whether he sings the theme tune…
The Amazing World of Gumball just got wonderfully weird with, um, The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball featuring, among many weird wonders, a slam-dunking dinosaur…
Vanessa Kirby is on a desperate, one-night mission to save her (non-Marvel) family in Netflix’s Night Always Comes…
It’s all getting a bit nuts (actually a lot nuts) in the NSFW trailer for animated doggy-com Fixed, from Genndy Tartakovsky. We’re a long way from Hotel Transylvania…
‘Normal adult stuff’ turns out to be anything but in the second season of Seth Rogen/Rose Byrne friendship-com Platonic…
Olivia Cooke is The Girlfriend that mum Robin Wright’s got a suspicious eye on in this tease for the Prime Video show, which looks both naughty and knife…
The latest trailer for Disney’s sci-fi threequel goes bigger on character and action, giving a fuller look at Ares (Jared Leto), the AI program who’s dragged from virtual reality into the real world as a potentially lucrative super-soldier, but decides he doesn’t want to be an expendable grunt. The red-neon-drenched set-pieces see lightcycles slicing their way through traffic, as well as the digital soldiers taking flight in wingsuits for skirmishes with fighter jets. But, even with a first look at (a thankfully not de-aged) Jeff Bridges, the biggest reveal was a new Nine Inch Nails song, with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ band supplying the soundtrack. You can listen to ‘As Alive As You Need Me To Be’ in full now.
On the Wingman office stereo…
Friendship’s Craig obsesses over this Slipknot track when he’s getting into ‘punk’ through his new buddy. The horror-masked heavy-metal ninesome’s 1999 single takes at least one Wingman straight back to high school…
As much as there is plenty to look forward to from Trailer Club nothing can make me more excited than any update on the new series of Stranger Things. I have been a huge fan of the show for years, I've seen the play since the last season dropped and I have been eagerly waiting for an update on the new season ever since