Friendship (2024)

Rated R for a lot of f-bombs coupled with discussions of a sexual nature.  I mean, if you can handle the other stuff that Tim Robinson makes, you can handle this.  Nothing truly vulgar happens, especially if you consider visual things.  It's just an R-rated comedy where something occasionally inappropriate happens.  There's the implication that Tami is cheating on Craig, but that's not here nor there.  Still, R.

DIRECTOR:  Andrew DeYoung

There's some double-edged sword stuff going on here.  I don't have a lot of battery left on my computer and no way to charge for a couple of hours.  But beyond that, I don't know how much I have to say about Friendship.  It's a movie that I got to see in the theaters and it bums me out that this is considered a 2024 film (the things that irk me a little, I swear).  

This movie should have been a slam dunk.  There's a surprising number of movies that I want to see in the theaters right now.  But I was also going out with my wife and I was also super tired.  I don't think that she was in the mood or the new Mission: Impossible movie and I hear the first hour of that film is a snoozefest, which is a bummer because I really want to see it.  Sinners is just not up her alley.  She fell asleep for the last Wes Anderson movie.  So Friendship, a comedy starring Paul Rudd and Tim Robinson seemed like it should have been absolutely perfect.  I've also been lamenting that the cinematic comedy has almost been non-existent, so I thought that we'd get that rare Step-Brothers vibe going out to see Friendship.  Yeah, not so much.

Now here's what I'm going to concede.  There are laughs to be found in Friendship.  I laughed more and harder than my wife did.  She genuinely seemed to actively dislike the movie.  I left more with a "meh" attitude.  It's not a laugh a minute.   But when the laughs come, they are substantial.  Honestly, I hope I remember the drug trip in this movie long after this movie has been relegated to "just another movie I watched."  I might quote that sequence for a while.  But in terms of presenting something as a whole work, Friendship almost doesn't work.  

Part of that comes from the style of comedy that Tim Robinson presents.  When I watched that first episode of I Think You Should Leave, I was a big fan of it.  The guy was a genius.  I'm going as far as to say that Tim Robinson is a comedic genius, especially when it comes to cringe comedy.  He thrives in making a situation that should resolve itself fairly normally so much worse.  And I'll tell you this:  I love cringe comedy.  It's more of a matter that Tim Robinson keeps returning to the same well.  The beginning of Friendship has Craig and Tami going to a cancer survivors' support group.  Tami admits something sexually frustrating about Craig, which he has to take with grace and it seems like the comedy is going to come from Craig not being able to express his frustrations.  But as the movie progresses, Craig becomes more and more unrelatable.  There are so many moments where we know that no normal person would act the way that Craig is.  It's a lot of "Can you imagine if I did this?" moments.  Those are funny in sketch comedy moments.  But when we're trying desperately to find a way for Craig to make his way through an awkward life, the fact that he's constantly throwing zany curveballs makes it really hard to treat him as the protagonist.

The honest takeaway is that this is an episode of I Think You Should Leave with a loosely tying narrative.  I don't know who Andrew DeYoung is.  Maybe he worked on the show.  Maybe he just knows what Tim Robinson does and offered him free rein.  I don't know, man.  It gets a little tiring after a while.  The thing about liking that first episode of I Think You Should Leave is that I realized that Tim Robinson loves making the punchline "scream really loud at everyone in the room".  It kind of gets old.  I tell my four-year-old that the punchline should never be yelling, but Tim Robinson made a career out of it.  I'll even say that he's very funny a lot of the time.  But if the goal of comedy is to be caught off guard by something, betting that Tim Robinson is going to yell at someone who should not be yelled at doesn't really make for compelling comedy a lot of the time.  

Now, does this movie have something to say?   In the way that it is formatted, not really.  There are threads of things that could be shaped into a movie.  But the problem is that we have such an outlandish character as our protagonist that there's nothing to really learn from this character.  Craig doesn't grow.  He's as static of a character as one could imagine. He's weird at the beginning.  He's even more weird at the end.  (I suppose that's a form of dynamic, but I don't care for it.) Now, if Paul Rudd's Austin was the protagonist, there's actually something to play with then.  I mean, it would be The Cable Guy,  a movie that touches on a lot of the same notes that absolutely cooks.  But when we see Craig self-sabotage every scene he's in, there's really no hope that these characters will come out of this story with any sense of growth as people.  When we watch Matthew Broderick's Steven in The Cable Guy distance himself from Jim Carrey's Chip Douglas (I haven't watched this movie in safely 1.5 decades and those names just popped in there), despite the fact that Steven is in the moral right, there are moments where Steven's behavior could be criticized as insensitive.  It doesn't change that Chip is a maniac.  It simply makes the protagonist have some tough self-examination.  That's interesting stuff.

Instead, watching Tim Robinson scream at people for two hours gets a little bit old.  The bits are good.  In isolation or as shorts, I could see a lot of those bits hitting harder than they would in context of the film.  But beyond simply being bits strung together, the movie isn't much.  It is almost afraid to give Craig some vulnerability.  Rarely do I feel bad for the guy that no one wants to hang out with him.  It is impossible for him to make friends in the movie.  When people need to be grounded so Craig can be silly, they are.  But those same characters then act like complete nut jobs when Craig's character does the right thing.  I'm talking about singing to Austin when he's having a hard time.  Craig, who often lives in a bizarro world full of bizarre rules, is confused when these characters are acting weird.  But when he acts bizarre, no one can relate to him.  It's a lot of "take our word for it, this is how people act in this world".  I don't like that.

It doesn't change the fact that a lot of the bits are funny.  It's just that the movie is not good.