Review // The Riot Club

[projekktor id=’18222′]

A heavy-handed parable about the dangers of upper class privilege among students at Oxford University, Lone Sherfig’s The Riot Club seeks to teach a lesson that most people already know.

The film follows two first year students, the sullen, snobbish Alistair Ryle (Sam Claflin) and the friendly, down-to-earth Miles Richards (Max Irons), as they begin their education on the hallowed grounds of the ancient school. While Alistair comes from a long line of Oxford men (his over-bearing father demands he be put in his brother’s old dorm room) and plans to follow in the footsteps of his uncle (a Tory MP) Miles seems out of place among the self-important old money. He finds solace in another outsider, the charmingly blue-collar Lauren (Holliday Granger).

Soon however, Miles has caught the eye of a group of the school’s most privileged students who call themselves The Riot Club, a drunken dining group that traces it’s heritage back to one particularly obnoxious dandy. The Riot Club plans a Bacchanalian banquet each year at which their members drink themselves stupid in celebration of their status. It is also a gateway into the upper-crust of English society, the type of helping hand Miles finds too hard to pass up when he’s invited to join.

Forced off campus by parties in the past, the club are forced to hold their dinner at a quaint village pub in the country. The owner and his daughter are excited at first to have such distinguished (and high paying) guests at their restaurant, going so far as to make a sort of extreme turducken dinner for the party. However as the night wears on the party turns wilder and darker, exemplifying the class divide between the staff and the guests.

The dinner serves as the major action of the film and represents nearly half of the screen time. Though it begins as an interesting slow-burn upstairs-downstairs sequence, it drags as the club members find endless ways to pour booze into their mouths or declare their superiority over the lower class. As it finally reaches it’s violent finale, you’re so sick of being locked in a room with these dimwits you don’t even mind how anti-climactic the whole thing is.

While the film clearly wishes to make a point about class and wealth divide, it undermines itself by populating both sides with caricatures. No doubt young men like those of The Riot Club exist, but they’re painfully one-dimensional here. The conflict between Alistair and Miles feels completely manufactured, and Lauren – while the most realistic, likeable part of the film – ends up as a mere symbol of the victimized lower class.

Though it fills it’s cast with interesting young faces, and places them amongst the scenic bricks and walkways of Oxford’s campus, The Riot Club never manages to do or say anything all that interesting. That young men from families of old money will get into trouble and avoid punishment is a reality to anyone who reads the newspaper. What’s interesting in these tales is the string pulling and the carefully constructed cover ups; the drunken debauchery is simply a catalyst. The Riot Club decides to focus on the party and skip through the aftermath, because of that, the party is a bust.

Reviewed by Evan Arppe.