A cracking film if you want to strengthen your hatred of upper class, privileged, rich idiots. I was expecting to hate this film but I actually enjoyed it despite walking away feeling unfulfilled. It is uncomfortable, unpleasant viewing, with many caricatures, but never quite realises the unsettling conclusion it obviously wants to convey. It is much like "The Beach" where it makes you feel dirty for watching but still leaves you unsatisfied.I went to Oxford University and not everyone is posh as sin. You do meet privileged, rich people who went to Eton, Harrow and Winchester but normally they're cleverer than this lot. Only the girls are depicted as being down to earth. My Oxford was not this debaucherous, lecherous or alcoholic. However, the tutorial with Sam West was quite representative as debates in tutorials can get heated at times. I felt the posing and posturing (e.g. during the photograph they take outside the pub) was depressingly unrepresentative of most Oxford Students.It doesn't have much plot and obviously wishes to convey the message that you can get away with anything if you're rich and scheme to the maximum but the quick ending to the movie doesn't justify the message. Alistair (Sam Claifin) ends up taking the fall and gets an offer of a nice job without having to finish university. He has obviously engineered the whole thing to his advantage but this is passed over too quickly at the end of the film to make enough impact.There are some excellent young actors here (e.g. Ben Schnetzer was fantastic in "Pride") but they're not really given the dialogue they deserve and they're so visually similar it's difficult to tell them apart at times. Tom Hollander is a fantastic addition as ex-Riot Club member, now 'fix it all' father and it's a shame he doesn't appear more. I was also impressed by Freddie Fox (who acts shallow, all about the fun President of the club very well) and Max Irons (for his distraught, lost it all through betrayal pain). The other young actors play nasty cowards very well.There are some beautiful shots of Oxford, which is a gorgeous city and well worth a visit. It's funny that they mix all the colleges together to make one, for example the dining room is Christ Church (I think) and the 'horrible' rooms shown are St John's - then again you would only know that if you knew the city. The volume changes were ridiculously annoying though, making it difficult to hear the dialogue when there are just two people and being stupidly over loud when there is a party.You're obviously meant to hate all the members of the Riot Club and you do. The emasculation, pay-off and eventual assault on the publican is extremely uncomfortable viewing. The attempted paid rape of Lauren post their "whore" rejecting them is repulsive. I don't know what I would have done with the offer of £27k, it's a lot of money but then again I've never given oral sex to a guy in my life. You really do applaud her for walking away and it just strengthens the expected hatred of upper class in favour of the state school student who gets in without having to pay for it.Overall I enjoyed this film but was unsatisfied with the conclusion. It could have been a lot more thriller than it ended up being.

It's funny how this same story, if portrayed about blue-collar young men in the USA, would just seem trashy. Here, with Oxford and Brit accents, it becomes some kind of morality play for our times. It is the old story of privilege and class collision. There is no new insight. Perhaps the vicarious drunkenness and violence are meant to draw in a teen audience. The characters are anachronistic at best. The only redeeming feature is its attempt to poke at the class issue with some sensibility, despite the overboard histrionics in the pub scene. Unfortunately, it is still who you know, not what you know. That much rings all too true.

Miles and Alistair are a couple of privileged freshmen at Oxford University. Miles appears to be a fairly decent fellow who has become romantically involved with a working class student called Lauren, while Alistair has delusions of grandeur and several loose screws. Both are invited to join a club devoted to drunkenness and debauchery, and after enduring some juvenile initiation rites, the two novices join some veteran student hedonists for a bacchanalian feast in a country pub's private dining room.The second half of the film observes the tedious antics of these spoiled fascist brats at their interminable blow-out. The aristocratic lowlifes turn out to be no more sophisticated than soccer hooligans as they over-indulge in various intoxicants, insult the pub's staff, get rejected by a prostitute and trash the joint. After Alistair lures Lauren to the gathering, the entitled yahoos insult and assault the girl. Unfortunately, the dramatic effect of this pivotal scene is diluted by the minimal time devoted to Lauren's relationship with Miles, compared to the endless depiction of drunken mayhem. Despite some decent acting, the film misses several opportunities to make a deeper impression as it focuses on the evening's degeneration into an orgy of excess.

A cast of outstanding young British actors all acting superbly, together with several very fine, and already established character players, a 'name' director and a successful West End play so why isn't "The Riot Club" more engaging than it is? Probably because there's very little on the screen to like. "The Riot Club" is said to be very loosely based on the real life Bullingdon Club and is about a group of thoroughly unpleasant, extremely rich young men at Oxford, members of the club of the title, who have dedicated themselves to decadence and debauchery and really just being absolute shits.It's very well done though I'm not sure it tells us very much about the state of the nation that we didn't already know. All this movie really does is reinforce an already held belief that being stinking rich is basically tantamount to being totally objectionable and getting away with it. It's a hateful picture but a hatefully compelling one, nevertheless.