THE RIOT CLUB is the film adaptation of Laura Wade’s acclaimed 2010 play Posh, a story about a lavish dinner party thrown by fictional dining society and group of baddies The Riot Club. The change of name from stage to screen was in all likelihood an effort to make the film more accessible to, well, everyone who isn’t an Oxbridge graduate but, given the movie’s content, one wonders why they even tried.
The film follows Miles (Max Irons, the son that Jeremy Irons publically wondered if he could legally make his husband under new gay marriage laws) as he fops his way through his first term at Oxford University, tapping at his Macbook, having sweaty undergraduate sex in oak-panelled rooms and generally not winning us over in the way he was presumably supposed to. It became difficult to feel sorry for poor old super good-looking, privately-educated Miles as he inexplicably fails to do anything to protect his girlfriend from the film’s more unpleasant events, beyond making a chiseled/confused expression and asking his new pals ‘why are you doing this?’ over and over again.
A good job was done in casting – the club’s members are suitably loathsome, although one isn’t sure if Douglas Booth is doing any acting or is just naturally that smug looking. I suspect some kind of genius was behind the casting of Natalie Dormer as the prostitute, who looks eerily like a sexed-up version of the film’s Normal Gal heroine, Lauren, played by Holliday Grainger.
The whole thing feels like a P.G. Wodehouse-penned episode of Skins, with all the stilted dialogue of the latter, which is a little surprising given that Laura Wade wrote the screenplay. One particularly grievous example sees two giddy students on a roof while Alt-J (how young and cool!) fuels a shindig beneath them exclaiming that going to Oxford is like ‘being invited to 100 parties all at once’. Yuck.
That said, the film hits its stride in the second half, where the events and the script start to match the play more closely, and things take on a genuinely sinister and disquieting tone. Where Miles doesn’t quite pull on your heartstrings, Gordon Brown (no, not that one) as the painfully earnest pub landlord practically yanks them out of your chest with his hammy fists. So much greater is the strength of the second half that I was left doubting the need for building the slightly flat extra narrative around the pre-existing plot of the play at all.
THE RIOT CLUB will not, one thinks, be popular with Oxford University’s admissions department for making the place look like a nightmare of merlot and wankers, nor indeed with the current ‘Bullingdon Club’-spawned Cabinet on whose antics ‘The Riot Club’ is not-at-all based. But, if you like floppy haircuts, old building porn and soft class commentary, this is a film for you.
If THE RIOT CLUB was a soft drink it would be Diet Coke – not bad in and of itself, but not as good as its original format.
Imogen West-Knights 