The Riot Club (2014)

Directed by: Lone Scherfig
Country: UK

Movie Review: Laura Wade’s film adaptation of her own play “Posh”, wasn’t so successful as expected, since “The Riot Club”, handled by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig (“Italian for Beginners”, “An Education”), couldn’t trigger neither sympathy nor startling reaction in regard to the wild behaviors of a bunch of upper-class students attending Oxford University. Miles (Max Irons) and Alistair (Sam Claflin) are two very different aristocratic freshmen who don’t get along, having in common the fact that they became members of an exclusively male ‘dining club’ with years of tradition in Oxford, known as ‘The Riot Club’. While Miles seeks a normal life with his girlfriend Loren, Alistair can’t avoid showing his ostentation and bad nature. Being the younger brother of a legendary former member of the ‘Riot club’, Alistair will show during one single night of drinks, cocaine and destruction in a local restaurant, how much his soul is corrupted and ill-founded, fact that leads to thoughtless, savage behaviors. The film takes a long time to warm up, and when it does, lets us down quite immediately, since the extreme situations depicted never seemed totally convincing to me, but rather overdone. Dialogues and behaviors fell on banality for several times and no novelty is drawn from the outcome. Wade and Scherfig tried to make of this club of punishment and self-degradation an intoxicating drama, occasionally wild, taking the opportunity to introduce a bit of bitter romance. The result, a mix of grotesque “Dead Poets Society” meet a pretentious “A Clockwork Orange”, wallows in the mud, providing a threadbare experience.