Nicholas Hoult may be known for a few roles such as Beast in "X-Men: Days of Future Past" and Jack in "Jack the Giant Slayer" but he has yet to catch a break from a very good role. Finally he was given the main role for the movie adaptation John Niven's cult 90s-set novel "Kill Your Friends", a movie that would have given him the opportunity to show what he had to offer because there was plenty of screen time for him as the ruthless Steven Stelfox.
The movie "Kill Your Friends" revolves around the cruel ambition of Stelfox, an A&R manager whose only interests are money and cocaine, to go up the corporate ladder of the record label company that he works for. Overly fixated to rise to the top, he resorts to all brutal means to eliminate those who tries to get in the way. Did Nicholas Hoult manage to pull it off with this thriller comedy movie?
Sadly no, according to the reviews the movie has gotten after "Kill Your Friends" premiered at the Toronto Film Festival Saturday. Benjamin Lee in The Guardian gives this movie 2 stars out of 5 and calls it "Tiresome" and he wrote in a review, "The difficulty with black comedy is avoiding overkill and Kill Your Friends is a dictionary definition of the word." Furthermore he compared Hoult with Christian Bale for his role as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Besides saying that HOult looks too young for the role who fails to imbue the nasty one-liners, he also said that Hoult's Stelfox is "He's Patrick Bateman played by a Topman model."
Another critic has given "Kill Your Friends" a negative review and like Lee, he finds it tiresome. Variety critic Andrew Barker says, "A number of his quips hit the target - like describing a bashful indie-loving scout as "putting the 'uh' and 'er' in A&R" - but just as often they wallow in a tiresome tenor of try-hard transgressiveness, whipping out incest and HIV metaphors in a manner more pushy than shocking, Music Business Worldwide Reports.
"After exhausting most of its satirical energy, "Kill Your Friends" simply traces Steven's race to the bottom of human depravity in its second half, growing more bloodily extreme and less interesting as it goes."
Needless to say there are those who still find the movie enjoyable. However Nicholas Hoult has shown us that he is rather fit for good guy roles instead.
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