Film reviews: Friendship and Fight or Flight

Friendship

Directed by Andrew DeYoung (R)

The new comedy that gives Tim Robinson his first lead film role "feels exactly right for exactly right now," said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. Thanks to his sketch show, I Think You Should Leave, he has become "the poster boy for male social anxiety," and Friendship effectively expands that remit. Robinson plays Craig Waterman, an awkward suburban dad who briefly befriends his neighbor Austin, a cool TV weatherman played by Paul Rudd. When Austin breaks things off because Craig is too weird, Craig loses it, prompting "another Tim Robinson master class in self-immolation." The actor has won Emmys already, and "I can see him on that clown-to-thespian trajectory that ends with an Oscar."

There are moments of "glorious weirdness" here "capable of inducing zero-to-full-giggle-fit reactions," said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Still, "the whole of Friendship isn't as attractive as the sum of its disparate parts," because "long stretches of uncomfortable dead air" fill the time between the scenes that play like "instant classics" from Robinson's Netflix show. But thanks to the cinematic choices made by writer-director Andrew DeYoung, the movie is "far more than a sitcom in feature form," said Matt Zoller Seitz in RogerEbert.com. "Visually, sonically, and musically immersive," it "puts real thought into how to convey Craig's warped point of view and make us feel his insecurity, self-loathing, and anger." While it may not be the comic masterpiece some early critics claimed it to be, "it's impressive, not just for the leaps it makes but the assurance it displays."

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Fight or Flight

Directed by James Madigan (R)

"Fight or Flight has one thing working in its favor: Josh Hartnett," said Chloe Walker in The A.V. Club. Coming off his performance in last summer's Trap, another thriller with comic touches, the 46-year-old actor's charismatic turn here makes clear that he's "picked a lane for the second act of his career," and because he excels in this mode, "it's hard to blame him." But Fight or Flight's "insultingly thin" plot asks Hartnett to play a one-man army taking on a commercial airliner full of assassins and gives him little to work with except "endless splattery fights." Fortunately, the fights are choreographed with "a pure Looney Tunes spirit," said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast, and the film as a whole proves "just clever enough to sustain its brief running time."

Hartnett's Lucas Reyes is a wreck of a former Secret Service agent who's become the desperation choice to board an international flight and identify and apprehend a mysterious cyber-criminal known as the Ghost. But the plane is full of trained killers who want the Ghost dead and, soon, Lucas too. Hartnett's deft handling of the resulting comic mayhem "would earn him a standing ovation from Bugs and Daffy." The movie's first two-thirds, at least, are "a rowdy good time," said Christian Zilko in IndieWire. But those action sequences, limited by budget and the tight setting, "devolve into pure camp." Maybe that's sufficient. In any case, "by the time a chain saw inexplicably materializes, it's clear that the film has fully embraced its status as a B movie."