I enjoyed the first half of Friendship, but it felt like I was watching a different movie than the rest of the audience. They laughed hysterically, while I found it to be more of a thriller with comedic elements. It felt like the inverse of The Cable Guy with Jim Carrey—a thriller-comedy that puts the thriller elements first, rather than a comedy with the story structure of a thriller. While I didn’t laugh, I found myself engaged with the story.

Without delving too deep into the plot, I thought the sudden disappearance of a certain character should have been a turning point—something that motivated Craig to go after Austin for revenge, now having a flimsy justification for his fixation on him. Instead, the film treads water with scene after unrelated scene of Craig being weird, goofy, and awful, in the mold of a generic studio comedy, but doing nothing to advance the storyline. The most egregious example comes in the form of an acid trip that could be cut from the film without affecting anything, and seems to exist for no reason other than to make some easy product placement coin from Subway. At least when David Lynch promoted Heineken and Pabst Blue Ribbon in Blue Velvet, it was done in a way that revealed something about the characters’ psychology based on their taste in beer.

Finally, the film abruptly decides to be a thriller again during a climax that comes out of nowhere and then just ends, leaving me unsatisfied.

In Defense of Paul Dano: Subtle Acting, There Will Be Blood, and the Limits of Hot Takes.