The Riot Club (UK Rating: 15)
The Bullingdon Club, the exclusive Oxford society infamous for its banquets and trashing of venues, leapt to centre stage when it was revealed that Messrs. Cameron (David), Osborne (George), and Johnson (Boris) were all members during their student days. Perfect material for a play, it arrived at the Royal Court in the form of Laura Wade’s Posh in 2010. Now the notorious real-life Bullingdon Club comes to the big screen on Friday, with a new name, in the shape of The Riot Club – and the name is not all that’s changed! Opening around the UK on Friday, 19th September, Lights, Camera, Action!‘s Freda Cooper is on hand to deliver the final verdict.
The film starts with the arrival of two freshers, Miles (Max Irons) and Alastair (Sam Claflin). They come from contrasting backgrounds; the privileged Alastair whose ‘legend’ of a brother once chaired the Riot Club, and the decidedly middleclass Miles. They soon come into contact with the club members and are nominated to join. Once their initiation ceremonies are over, they prepare to attend their first club dinner – complete with hand-made suits and stiff collars – where the society lives up to its name.
The theatre origins of the piece are obvious right from the start, with a number of scenes in confined spaces, most noticeably the film’s climax, which is set in an upstairs pub dining room. Despite sequences set in and around Oxford, the film never really escapes the confinement of the stage but, while it carries its background with it, it’s also left something of the original behind: humour. The play allowed for some laughter, which also made the audience feel a twinge of sympathy for the characters, regardless of their dreadful actions. That’s all gone here, which leaves a group of privileged, spoiled young men who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. None of them have any redeeming features – not even Miles, who is the closest the film has to a moral compass – so the overall tone is very much ‘one-note.’
The actors cast as the mandatory ten members of the club are all impossibly beautiful – floppy hair, chiselled cheekbones and jaws – so, when they pose for their photograph before the start of the dinner, it’s more like a fashion shoot. Is the audience watching the future of British acting? If so, it resurrects the whole debate about so-called ‘posh actors’ like Freddie Fox and Douglas Booth, both of whom appear in the film. It’s more likely, however, that the audience is being asked if they are watching a future British government – albeit a fictional one. By the time the credits roll, the answer is pretty clear.
The climax of the dinner party, which comes complete with a savage beating, is uncomfortable to watch, but worse is to come. Not that the club trash anywhere else, but it becomes crystal clear that the person charged with the beating has no regrets, has learned nothing and will have the best legal defence money can buy. The last shot shows him smiling; the old boy network rules.
