How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

Based on Toby Young’s tome about his spectacular fuck-ups and flameout at Vanity Fair, Robert Weide’s big-screen version is sitcom-drab. Simon Pegg plays Young, reducing the writer into nothing more than a barely functioning idiot. Worse, the story has been turned into a romantic comedy: Young woos his considerably smarter superior, Alison Olsen (Kirsten Dunst). It plays like a made-for-TV redo of The Devil Wears Prada, which was likewise set at a Manhattan glossy but happened to contain some insightful observations about the perils of workplace success.