The Riot Club - movie review: 'All the performances by Sam Claflin and the young male cast are superb'

Are you impressed — aroused, even — by the stinking rich? If so, get ready to hold your nose
Charlotte O'Sullivan6 January 2015

Lone Scherfig’s follow-up to An Education is a morality tale somewhat lacking in nuance. Basically, the film is unlikely to impress the Left-wing intellectuals who flocked to see Posh, the 2010 play on which it is based. Yet maybe the Danish director is targeting a different demographic. It’s almost as if the film has been designed to make fans of Downton Abbey realise the error of their ways. Are you impressed — aroused, even — by the stinking rich? If so, get ready to hold your nose.

Scriptwriter Laura Wade (who wrote Posh) has added a first act that encourages us to feel sympathy for chalk ’n’ cheese public schoolboys, uptight Alistair (Sam Claflin) and chilled-out Miles (Max Irons). Both are prospective members of a private drinking club (based on the University of Oxford’s Bullingdon Club, to which David Cameron and Boris Johnson once belonged).

The club members themselves are saucy cherubs. They are learned. They adore animals. When Alistair is mugged by unsightly Oxford locals the especially gorgeous Harry (Douglas Booth) instantly lends a hand.

All roads lead to a raucous pub dinner at which Miles and Alistair seek to impress the big boys. The pub is run by a hard-working prole who has a smart and beautiful daughter (played by Downton Abbey’s very own Jessica Brown Findlay). He also has wholesome, down-to-earth guests.

One lot have gathered for a birthday party held in honour of their dear old mother (I told you The Riot Club wasn’t subtle). Sinister music tells us that something is going to go wrong and it’s obvious that Alistair will be the trouble-maker. Given all we’ve seen, it seems likely that Miles will save the day or die trying. The world needs men like Miles — nice toffs. That, surely, is the message the film is going to hammer home.

The dialogue is witty. The performances by the young male cast are superb. Claflin captures his character’s vitriol particularly well. Alistair’s sense that he is actually a victim of the system, scapegoated by envious hoi polloi and even his own peers, is palpable. These insecure young men aren’t romanticised or demonised. They do what they do because the rewards for impressing each other are so high.

A shame the actors playing the commoners don't have as much to do (they mostly just have to look appalled: a thespian's nightmare). We certainly feel for them, but only the fizzy, witchy Natalie Dormer — as a prostitute hired to perform ten blow jobs – manages to surprise us. Unlike the hookers in The Wolf of Wall Street, Charlie is more than T & A. We feel her brain ticking over, assessing how much danger she's in.

Scherfig and Wade don't use females to titillate the viewer. It's pouting pretty boys they want to expose. And they're playing the long game. Even if The Riot Club doesn’t make an enormous impression at the box office (its ending might be too bleak) it seems certain to come into its own on the small screen. Imagine the damage it could inflict at the ballot box if the timing is right.

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