THE writer-director Neil LaBute, whose In the Company of Men was admired by many and despised by me, has come up with his second effort, Your Friends & Neighbors. The former, which won awards at Sundance (always a bad sign) and from the New York Film Critics Circle, concerned a compact between two men to avenge themselves on women by seducing and destroying a sweet, blind office worker. It was the kind of movie only a fundamentally unpleasant person could have concocted; it shed no light and plumbed, except in quality, no depth.
Your Friends & Neighbors, which does not have the home-movie look of its predecessor, is otherwise an equally nasty piece of work, to whose cheapness even the characters’ rhyming names attest. Barry, Cary, and Jerry are best friends. Barry is married to Mary; Jerry is living with Terri; Cary screws, or tries to, everything in skirts. They live in an anonymous city, have (except for Jerry, a drama prof, and Cary, a gynecologist) unspecified jobs, and exist only as pawns for LaBute’s mean-spirited games.
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