How to Lose Friends & Alienate People is an uneven film, one which tries to balance comedy, satire, and romance all at once and in its attempts to do so fails to strike a chord with the audience. It’s too broad to be funny enough, not smart enough to work as a satire, and the romance feels tacked on.
Based on a memoir by a real life journalist, the film tells the true story of British journalist Sydney Young who is invited, to his amazement, to work at a high profile magazine in New York City. But no matter how hard he tries to do otherwise, he always seems to rub people the wrong way with everything he does.
I don’t refute the effort to do something different with well worn genres. We have all become annoyingly accustomed to the way romance plays out in feature films and how comedy nowadays is all too often about juvenile humour. And on top of that we have an attempt at satire on the world of magazines and how an incident lands on front covers all across the world.
But the problem with the film is it doesn’t go deep enough into this world for anyone in the know to recognise much from what goes on in real life but at the same time its goes just that bit too deep resulting in it alienating, like the title suggests, any naïve viewers out there. So when we are taken on the tour of the headquarters of the building and introduced to the various elements which make it up we are left feeling lost and confused because don’t know enough already to “get” the gags. But at the same time for anyone on the other side of the fence who knows about this world, it’s not recognisable enough in that respect. So it strikes this kind of middle ground of both types of audience members to be left hanging.
Now, what makes How to Lose Friends in any way worthwhile? Well, two words: Simon Pegg. This guy is some serious comedic talent and one to watch for the future. Starting off in British TV comedy with the cult show Spaced and then going on to make two of the best comedies in recent times, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, he is now trying his luck across the pond. And it’s a shame to see he hasn’t been getting the praise and recognition he so very much deserves in the US. For some reason audiences just aren’t responding to him as much as British audiences did, and still do. He’s easily the best element of How to Lose Friends, without question the funniest thing in it. It may just be a personal preference for his style but I just found his mannerisms and way of delivering the lines had me smiling whenever he was on screen (which, thankfully, is the majority of the film). I think he was the perfect choice for this role; I really believe if anyone else had played the role it would have felt just wrong and it definitely would have lost most, if not all, of its laughs.
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