Friendship (A PopEntertainment.com Movie Review)

Friendship

FRIENDSHIP (2024)

Starring Tim Robinson, Kate Mara, Jack Dylan Grazer, Paul Rudd, Josh Segarra, Billy Bryk, Jason Veasey, Jon Glaser, Eric Rahill, Conner O'Malley, Carmen Christopher, Craig Frank, Omar Torres, Jacob Ming-Trent, Daniel London, Whitmer Thomas, Raphael Sbarge, Ivy Wolk, Meredith Garretson, Mike J Mills, Alex Webb, Desi Waters and Brandi Burkhardt.

Screenplay by  Andrew DeYoung.

Directed by Andrew DeYoung.

Distributed by A24. 97 minutes. Rated R.

When I first heard the storyline for Friendship – a guy with no male friends is trying desperately to get a buddy to hang out with – I thought, wait a second, didn’t they do that like 15 years ago with I Love You, Man? That storyline similarity is even more pronounced because one of the guys in the “bromance” is played by Paul Rudd, who was also one of the leads in that earlier film.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love I Love You, Man. If you’re going to rip off an idea, you can do a lot worse. And if you get technical, even that film was sort of a variation on the storyline of the 2007 French film My Best Friend (Mon Meilleur Ami) with Daniel Auteuil and Dany Boon. Therefore, I kind of wrote Friendship off as a bit of a “been-there, done-that” situation.

Now that I have seen Friendship, I can truthfully say that the films are very, very different, other than just sharing the same basic concept. However, Friendship is much darker than the earlier films. Its sense of humor is very much more charged as well. And while, honestly, I liked the earlier films more, Friendship does stand on its own.

You see, Friendship takes things in a very different, blacker direction. Yes, in I Love You, Man, the new best friend was very different and got the lead into some trouble, but they were basically sympatico. Friendship looks at this situation if one of the new friends was kind of a psychopath. And, to make it even edgier, the crazy new friend is the lead character here.

There is a reason Craig Waterman (Tim Robinson) has no male friends – and it’s not that he gets along better with women, nor is it the fact that he’s just obsessive with his work, like in the other films. This guy is just massively weird. He has very few social skills, he has deep-seeded rage issues and he is obsessive about Marvel movies. He is an outcast at work and an outcast in life. Even his wife (Kate Mara) and son (Jack Dylan Grazer) can barely put up with him.

His ”friendship” with Austin Carmichael (Rudd), a local TV meteorologist who lives down the street, comes about by complete happenstance. A package meant for Austin was delivered to Craig’s home by mistake. As a neighborly gesture, Austin offers to get a drink with Craig. Craig, as is his nature, takes this offer way too seriously.

They do start hanging out together a bit, but on a night when Austin has a bunch of the guys over for drinks, Craig acts so strangely that Austin starts to pull away. This just makes Craig more obsessive, oscillating between attempting to win Austin back and harboring revenge fantasies against him.

Friendship is often rather funny, but it’s an uncomfortable type of humor. There is very little in the film that is laugh-out-loud funny, instead this film specializes in making the audience chuckle uneasily about the audacity and the sheer looniness of Craig’s actions and reactions. Truthfully, the people around me at the screening appeared to be laughing much more than I did, but even I can acknowledge that Friendship is oddly, darkly humorous.

I wouldn’t ever want to have to deal with Craig in real life, but from the distance of sitting in a theater seat he can be interesting to spend some time with.

Jay S. Jacobs

Copyright ©2025 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: May 16, 2025.