Owen Harris' adaptation of John Niven's blackly comic dissection of modern Britain by way of the music industry has perhaps the best opening line of 2015. Introduced to Nicholas Hoult's Steven Stelfox by his neatly shined boots, only for flecks of coke to fall on them, he brutishly proclaims "Do these look like the shoes of someone who listens to The Velvet f*cking Underground?" So yeah, this is a movie that spends a lot of its time preaching how talent isn't important in a creative industry, with Stelfox advancing through the A&R department of a big record label through any means necessary, starting with murder and getting worse from there. Hoult's the real draw, smarmy but still relatable and making the whole thing palatable. It's not a perfect film by any means, but it finds enough joy in the sadistic mania to get you through the iffy parts. Not that other critics agreed, with the British release leaving it on 31% on RottenTomatoes. In contrast to the shockingly dark movies of the nineties this is aping, I don't think that's due to prudishness, rather the opposite; the film has lots of bold elements, but very little is actually boundary pushing. Fair enough it could have done more, although that doesn't stop it being entertaining.
