Review: The Riot Club

Are all wealthy assholes uninteresting? They all seem to be in The Riot Club, a wannabe cautionary tale that indulges in assholery for 90 minutes before wagging its finger at it all. Now I don't need ventures into depravity and privilege to teach me things. There are plenty of gangster movies that make me want to be a gangster, never balancing the bad behaviour with morality. However The Riot Club is never that appealing. I never wanted to be these boys and thus could never have fun living vicariously through the film.

The film is said to be loosely based on the play Posh, but the writer Laura Wade has denied the connection. The Riot Club is about 10 obscenely privileged brats who are enfolding two new candidates into the fold. One is living in the shadow of his brother, a former president of the club. The other is Miles Richards, played by Max Irons. He is the moral center of the film and we know this because his girlfriend is terribly un-posh. The film's second half focuses on one night where their debauchery goes to far.

Director Lone Scherfig did a wonderful job with An Education. Here he struggles to balance to tonal shift from riot to reprimand. He also doesn't have Nick Hornsby's witty dialogue to fall back on and Scherfig struggles to make the film visually interesting.  This points out how weak some of the dialogue and characters are. 

Riot Boys is fun for a little bit. The material seems suited more towards a show on the CW than it does a motion picture. The last minute shift to try to pull a lesson out of the movie makes the enjoyable first half feel like a guilty indulgence rather than fun. The ensemble is attractive but none of the performances feel deep or three dimensional. 

2.5/5