Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Perfectly adorable

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

I watched this movie as it was aired on Dutch television and was intrigued from the beginning.The movie starts off at a place that makes me hum "garden party" from Marillion, and is set beautifully. Then, she-bang, the reality of hard life kicks in and we see the formerly millionaire (Paul) been given a job out of pity by his former employee (Lizzie). Obviously, we are suddenly several years ahead ?!?? a few more of such jumps and we see Lizzie being in the board of management but seemingly without an actual vote. Her being the only woman there must account for that, I guess. Finally the dot-com bubble bursts and Paul is once again wealthy and Lizzie is not.I liked the believable acting, the beautiful shots and the insight in 20+ years of Brit-life. The downside is that the characters don't seem to develop, and that the plot is not really believable. Overall though, this movie is one of the better movies I've seen this year.

This film starts off with a great flourish, with Damian Lewis doing a perfectly tuned & on-target portrayal of a calm cool feral madman entrepreneur of the 1960s or 1970s, Paul Reynolds, surrounded by a collection of pretentious sycophants whose archetypes range back to the early Roman era. They party & posture amid Paul's palatial estate when Lizzie strolls in. Straight & serious Lizzie, for whom Paul develops an inexplicable attraction that ultimately leads to his & the film's doom. Lizzie, fresh from secretarial school, is hired by Paul as his personal assistant, although she never displays any sign of business or political aptitude. Given the task of organizing Paul's large collection of notes & papers into some kind of accessibility, she proudly shows him her accomplishment: everything's been prettily packaged & shelved in four color groups of boxes, no labels in sight, apparently interpreting her duties to be interior decoration.As played by Jodhi May, Lizzie splits her emotive energies between the coy tilted head smirks teenage girls give dad when they want $80 for new jeans and hysterical outbursts that make you wonder if this takes place in an alternate universe without the benefits of psychotherapy.There are other problems in placing this film in a known universe, although it tries hard to represent specific points in time. Early on, Paul dreamily says to Lizzie, "Computers, you should get into computers, that's where the future is. Women used to prevail in the field of computers but now the the guys are taking over." Oh yeah? The film becomes increasingly choppy & episodic as it proceeds. I began to feel as though I were watching a version of "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are dead" (sans Shakespeare or Stoppard) as done by Ed Wood, i.e. all the real action taking place in another universe. Vague generalizations substitute for plot movement, grand statements about corporations being hippos & the future of business being in telecommunications & the internet, not vacuum cleaners. Unh hunh. No mention of laptops or cell phones. Too bad. The first 20 minutes on Paul's estate & the ideas driving Friends & Crocodiles had a lot of promise. Great title, too. But the title's explanation, like the rest of the movie, are a terrible letdown.

I enjoyed Friends and Crocodiles and strongly suggest viewing it more than once. More nuances are then perceptible which fleshes out the story line that otherwise is convoluted and can be confusing. Both Paul and Lizzie demonstrate an extreme level of self control, although each of a different nature and each exhibited in vastly different ways. Lewis and May are exceptionally well suited for those two roles and do an excellent job of keeping the viewer focused on their personalities and the theme, rather than have attention wander off on other characters or subplots. The interplay between the two of them can easily be viewed as signifying human interaction in areas other than the business world.

As another viewer commented, this feature length production is pretty empty- both of story and characters. The two leads are both very irritating and have no real depth to them. How she ever becomes attached to him is never really shown. The only scenes they share are ones in which she is reprimanding him for some minor incident. In fact the only thing they ever do together at work is a colour coded file system, constantly viewed as some work of genius. She even later calls him her mentor- though we never see him teach her anything. Paul isn't half as enigmatic as he is made out to be either.All Friends and Crocodiles is, is a succession of shots of grand parties against the backdrop of the 1980s/1990s (with the obligatory brick mobile phone joke). There's a vague sense of whimsy about the story but it all feels rather forced. We never cared about these characters in the first place- so when their various falls from grace and rises to fortune happen, as an audience we just don't care.I'm sure the writer/directors other work is all very worth watching (like the 'The Lost Prince' for instance), and whilst 'Friends and Crocodiles' all looks similarly lavish and picturesque there is really nothing at all to it.My Dad summed it up perfectly as the credits rolled- 'Pathetic'