60
Well played across the board, The Riot Club is an entertaining glimpse into the dark side of privilege. Yet it lacks the richness and insight to be anything more.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
60
It makes for entertaining viewing but its power is undermined by a ultimate lack of insight amongst the debauchery.
60
Time Out London by Cath Clarke
Wade’s dialogue is totally convincing, all in-jokes and boarding school banter... The trouble with The Riot Club is that dramatically it never quite comes together.
80
The Guardian by Catherine Shoard
The Riot Club hands its audience a ticket, as well as a free pass to pour scorn over proceedings. That's a double-bill which should prove pretty irresistible.
38
Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard
The thinly sketched characters of the film are numerous and inconsequential, with director Lone Scherfig giving sparse attention to humanizing or deepening them.
50
The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney
Laura Wade’s adaptation of her hit play, Posh, has sacrificed much of its savage comedy en route to the screen, and while the dark drama is never dull, its portrait of upper-crust entitlement run amok is seldom surprising either.
60
Director Lone Scherfig’s stagings of these suspenseful set pieces are masterful, but the rest of the thriller is a fairly predictable manifesto against Britain’s de facto oligarchy.
42
The Playlist by Nikola Grozdanovic
All of that star-making and directorial grace Scherfig possesses is substituted for a bludgeoning attempt at provoking the British elite into taking a long hard look at themselves through a cracked mirror. She retains her confrontational sensibilities with none of the subtlety, and hammers a single message to mind-numbing effect.
80
Scherfig approaches the milieu with shrewd anthropological wit, amplifying Wade’s research with her own keen outsider insights — this on top of an expert grasp of tension and tone as the club’s initial allure turns to anxiety and disgust.
60
Some of the supporting performances are so hammily spiteful and giggly they let the side down, but the film is perfectly cast in its main roles.
This film takes on a bit too much between the ensemble cast and the romantic side plot, and it doesn't live up to the potential of the premise to deliver both a realistic insight into what happens behind closed doors in rooms many of us will never be invited into as well as thoughtful social commentary. As far as a realistic depiction, however, many actors as well as the writer/director said that former members of the club which the fictitious Riot Club was based on said that events of the film are actually understated as opposed to real life events.