I had no intention of seeing this movie. Seriously, I just didn’t care. The first time that I heard about it was two weeks ago when I saw the trailer before American Ultra. My thoughts were something along the lines of, “Oh, this doesn’t look all that interesting.” I then moved on and started thinking about other things in life, like how to brew a superior cup of coffee or whether or not Tony Stark has ever peed in his Iron Man suit. You know, the important philosophical topics that define my generation.
And then absolutely no one went to see We Are Your Friends.
And that meant that I must witness it.
You see, the thing you should know about me is that I love few things more than a good old fashioned trainwreck*. If I see a movie that looks like it’s going down in flames, I will move heaven and fucking earth in order to be there and eat popcorn while the flames of its destruction dance in my joy-filled eyes. So when I saw the opening weekend box office numbers, I kind of lost my mind.
If you don’t yet know, We Are Your Friends had a historically awful debut. Like, straight up abysmal, ya hear? In terms of movies that opened in more than 2,000 theaters, it has the fourth worst haul of all time. The only things that did worse than it in their first three days are Delgo**, Oogieloves in the BIG Balloon Adventure, and the tenth anniversary re-release of Saw. That is not the sort of friends that you want to have, if you catch my drift.
So let’s delve into this Delgo level tragedy, shall we? Of course we shall! That’s why I’m writing this and that’s why you clicked on it. We Are Your Friends stars former High School Musical star Zac Efron as Cole Carter, an aspiring DJ from the San Fernando Valley who spends his days hanging at a club with his besties and trying to make a name for himself in the world of Electronic Dance Music. As luck would have it, he meets world renowned DJ James (Wes Bentley, The Hunger Games) after a show, and the older musician swiftly takes Cole under his wing.
Complications arise when Cole finds himself attracted to James’ girlfriend/assistant Sophie (Emily Ratajkowski, the Blurred Lines video), and yeah, that’s about it. This causes some issues, but it’s resolved in time for Cole to open for James at a big LA show, and then the movie ends. There’s some other stuff that happens, but it’s all to the side, occurs quickly, and is forgotten even faster.
From what I can tell, We Are Your Friends commits two cardinal sins. Firstly, Zac Efron is terrible. He is the blandest of bland leading men here. Surrounding him are people who have some degree of character and personality, but all that he has going for him is that he is handsome and wears his headphones at all times. He gets very little from the script, and he isn’t able to add anything interesting to Cole on his own.
And Ratajkowski isn’t much better. She’s supposed to be this smart, savvy woman who was going to Stanford before she began her current career, but she always looks so fucking wooden and almost sounds like she’s speaking English for the first time in her life. I just looked it up and IMDb says that she was born in London. If that’s true, why does she sound like a Russian immigrant who got a role in some grindhouse flick and is reading her lines phonetically? Fuck me, she’s bad.
The second sin is that the movie seems to lose ambition about a third of the way through. Early on, there is an animated sequence where Cole is experiencing the world while on PCP. Paintings begin to bleed into the real world, melding with the people therein, and it’s a genuinely fun and beautiful scene to watch. Soon after, Cole describes his method of manipulating an audience into dancing, providing voice-over to a pretty kinetic visual representation of his monologue.
This stylized stuff occurs a few other times throughout the movie, but by the second half, it’s completely gone. Without it, We Are Your Friends becomes little more than another by-the-numbers coming of age story. It does nothing to set itself apart and is just kind of boring. Why would you abandon the thing that sets your movie apart? Why rid yourself of the single most interesting element that you have developed? As the man once said, “The world may never know.”
None of this is to say that We Are Your Friends is a bad movie. Its not. Boring? Yes. Forgettable? Bingo. Poorly constructed? Most definitely. Everything about it feels like it could have benefited from another draft or a stronger creative team***. Maybe that’s why it did so poorly at the box office. Its not good enough to draw in fans of movies, EDM, or Zac Effron. But at the same time, it’s not bad enough to bring in enough of the freaks like me who delight in terrible cinema. Its a horrible mismash of a movie that has no real home.
We Are Your Friends probably doesn’t deserve the distinction of being one of the floppiest flops of all time. Unfortunately for it, it does nothing to make itself memorable enough to even be remembered for being bad. Its destined to become little more than tears in rain, living only as a vague memory in the minds of those who were just curious enough to see it here and now. Oh well, Time to die.
*Oddly enough, I have not yet seen Trainwreck. Forgive me, please. I’ll get to it eventually.
**I own the poster to this piece of shit. Don’t ask why. Don’t ask scary questions.
***This is the first feature for the director and the screenwriter.
(Box Office information via Boxofficemojo.com)
