Movie trailers are like free samples at Costco: The good ones excite you and leave you wanting more, while the bad ones make you cringe. Each week, A&E columnist Matthew Fernandez will dissect movie trailers and analyze the Hollywood fare to come.
According to filmmaker Owen Harris and writer John Niven, you need to be a charming, hard-partying, mentally tortured murderer to make it in the music industry.
“Kill Your Friends” revisits the era of British ’90s pop music in a similar, glamorously brutal fashion. Nicholas Hoult stars as Stelfox, a music producer who decides to murder his friends and rivals to keep his job secure. The trailer promises an intense, drug-infused, visually engrossing romp into the world of big business.
The trailer quickly establishes Stelfox and his friends as high-flying business executives hopped up on drugs and attending exciting parties. It is also clear Stelfox is under pressure to find the next big musical hit or he will lose his job and the high.
However, “Kill Your Friends” departs from the metaphorical backstabbing and underhanded negotiations of other business films. Determined to avoid the chopping block, Stelfox takes matters into his own hands and decides to take his colleagues out of the picture, permanently.
Although the film is titled “Kill Your Friends,” I wasn’t sure if it was a figurative killing or a literal one. I was stunned by the level of sheer brutality of Hoult strangling another character with a dog leash and then stabbing him. From there, the trailer follows Stelfox as he devolves into a state of frenzied madness.
As I watched the trailer, I got the feeling “Kill Your Friends” was an amalgam of “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “American Psycho” and “House of Cards.”
The film seems to have the same irreverent, chaotic regard towards business and will promote the criminal as a hero, much like “The Wolf of Wall Street.” A brief scene in an airplane hints at Hoult monologuing at the audience, much like Kevin Spacey in “House of Cards.” “Kill Your Friends” also draws on the selfish, almost senseless brutality of “House of Cards” and “American Psycho;” a prominent figure commits secret murders to further his own interests at the cost of his own sanity.
The trailer even directly compares “Kill Your Friends” to its predecessors, calling it “this generation’s ‘American Psycho.’” This kind of comparison is risky because “American Psycho” has become something of a cult favorite, and placing the two movies in the same league creates lofty expectations for the film that it may not be able to reach.
While the trailer looks stunning and exciting, the final product has been a critical disappointment. “Kill Your Friends” was already released in Europe in late 2015, receiving lackluster reviews and only 33 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The biggest complaint seems to be the film’s lack of driving energy and inability to convey plausibility in the story.
“Kill Your Friends” is a perfect illustration of the deception inherent in trailers: The advertisement promises more than the film can deliver. Granted, the reviews are generally from European critics, whose tastes may differ from the American cinematic palate. However, the overwhelmingly negative response to the film is disheartening given the trailer’s energy and flashiness.
“Kill Your Friends” demonstrates why trailers need to be taken with a grain of salt. Although they can be a good gauge of what the movie will be like, trailers are first and foremost a moneymaking tool for movie studios and production companies. Even if a film is painfully boring, its trailer can make it seem more exciting by cramming all the exciting bits into a quick two-minute clip. It’s too bad that “Kill Your Friends” couldn’t match the showmanship of its trailer.
– Matthew Fernandez
What did you think of the new trailer for “Kill Your Friends?” Email Fernandez at mfernandez@media.ucla.edu.