Two Fresher undergraduates are recruited to join an exclusive dining society at Oxford known as 'The Riot Club' after an 18th. Century aristocrat who excelled in debauchery. The group set up a dinner in a local inn, become intoxicated with drink and cocaine and embark upon an evening of violence, abuse and physical assault.
It's all entertaining stuff with a number of excellent performances and some memorable lines. But there is a nasty and unwarranted slant to it that left me uncomfortable and even angry at times.
Essentially the film portrayed these modern British public schoolboys as arrogant, bigoted, snobbish and entirely unsympathetic with those born less fortuitously. Perhaps some old Etonians and Harrovians may well behave like this although I believe most do not.
But in all my time at Dartmouth, Cambridge and beyond I have never known a single public schoolboy who would descend into the mindless vandalism and sickening thuggish violence upon a defenseless publican that this film portrays. In truth such disgusting behavior which nearly kills an innocent man is much more likely to erupt from a working class youth than any public school undergraduate at Oxford. The plot was therefore not only absurd but a vicious assault upon the upper classes designed to make the public applaud their demise and replacement by today's manufactured celebrities and Billionaire elite.
The closing sequence which portrays a circle of corruption that protects these thugs had some justification - I am certain that such arrangements exist - but the beneficiaries are more likely to be the 'New Rich' than the Ancien classes as the film implies.
It's a good film to watch but please take it with a pinch of salt and remember that British public schoolboys may well do lots of stupid pranks and get very drunk and even create some incidental damage but they do not go around smashing planks over the heads of unconscious old men for fun!
It's all entertaining stuff with a number of excellent performances and some memorable lines. But there is a nasty and unwarranted slant to it that left me uncomfortable and even angry at times.
Essentially the film portrayed these modern British public schoolboys as arrogant, bigoted, snobbish and entirely unsympathetic with those born less fortuitously. Perhaps some old Etonians and Harrovians may well behave like this although I believe most do not.
But in all my time at Dartmouth, Cambridge and beyond I have never known a single public schoolboy who would descend into the mindless vandalism and sickening thuggish violence upon a defenseless publican that this film portrays. In truth such disgusting behavior which nearly kills an innocent man is much more likely to erupt from a working class youth than any public school undergraduate at Oxford. The plot was therefore not only absurd but a vicious assault upon the upper classes designed to make the public applaud their demise and replacement by today's manufactured celebrities and Billionaire elite.
The closing sequence which portrays a circle of corruption that protects these thugs had some justification - I am certain that such arrangements exist - but the beneficiaries are more likely to be the 'New Rich' than the Ancien classes as the film implies.
It's a good film to watch but please take it with a pinch of salt and remember that British public schoolboys may well do lots of stupid pranks and get very drunk and even create some incidental damage but they do not go around smashing planks over the heads of unconscious old men for fun!