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 Carreyāa thriller-comedy that puts the thriller elements first, rather than a comedy with the story structure of a thriller. While I didnāt 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 pointāsomething 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 charactersā 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.
So this is a straight two-and-a-half stars for me. Half the film is a compelling thriller; the other half is an unfunny comedy. The Cable Guy, ironically, satisfies more as a straight thriller than Friendship does, by paying attention to genre conventions and a three-act structure that serve to advance the plotāeven if the content is more openly comedic. It would be the superior option if you're looking for something in what one might call the ābromance gone badā category.
