‘Your Friends and Neighbors' Review: Jon Hamm's Upscale Crime Spree
If John Cheever had conjured up Andrew Cooper of 'Your Friends and Neighbors,' the severed hedge-fund bro played by Jon Hamm would be dipping in and out of contiguous swimming pools. Instead, he's robbing houses. One man's existential crisis is another's crime spree, one supposes. In Coop's case, alienation proves to be very expensive.
With no relation to the 1998 Neil LaBute film of the same name—except in its attempt at class assassination—this suburban-noir satire might be a victim of bad timing: Mr. Hamm, always watchable, makes Andrew more likable than he deserves to be in a nine-part series that casts the American Dream—if said dream involves having every material thing you could possibly want—as not just lacking but soul crushing. If you have a soul. During the Great Depression, movies cast the very rich as screwy. In Jonathan Tropper's very black comedy, they are far less amusing, as well as morally bankrupt. It feels a little easy.
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