The trailers hint that there might be laughs, that the tone of “Riff Raff” — a dark and bloody comedy about hit men, family, and how those two only exist together in the movies — could very well come off.
Jennifer Coolidge and Bill Murray rarely do us wrong. Ed Harris brings gravitas and reality to every role he plays. And Gabrielle Union is here to class up the joint.
Pete Davidson? Well, it’s a hit man comedy, so there’s a chance he’ll get popped. Remember how we all laughed and laughed when that happened in “Bodies Bodies Bodies?”
But then there’s the moment in the opening credits, when you’re walking in on a small distributor’s comedy and you see the “Directed by Dito Montiel” on the screen. And there’s nothing for it but to mutter Gordon Ramsay’s favorite expletive.
“F— me.”
Directors aren’t wholly responsible for whether a film comes off. Casting a movie well does wonders. But if a script has a scrap of promise to its premise, the director of “Man Down,” “Boulevard,” “”A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints” and “The Clapper” is your best bet to turn it into a Golden Raspberry Awards contender.
“Riff Raff” lives down to its title, a trashy movie with a gilded cast — a cast a tad tarnished thanks to the addition of this to their resumes.
Actor-turned-screenwriter John Polono (“Stronger”) cooked up a story of a mobster who’s buried his past, remarried and made a better life, two mobsters hunting him down via his unfortunate son and alcoholic ex, and a trio of varying-degrees-of-“innocent” bystanders, starting with the mobster’s adopted, Dartmouth-bound teenaged son.
Murray is the old trigger man they call “Lefty,” bluff and blunt and bullying around his amoral protege, Lonnie (Davidson). Something puts Lefty and Lonnie on the trail of an old acquaintance.
That would be Vincent (Harris), doting stepdad to smarty-pants D.J. (Miles J. Harvey), worshipful husband of too-classy-for-him Sandy (Union).
The intrusion of Vincent’s son from an earlier marriage, Rocco (Lewis Pullman), Roccos’s very pregnant Italian girlfriend Marina (Emanuela Postacchini) and Vincent’s blackout drunk ex-wife (Coolidge) is Vincent’s first clue that something awful is up.
“What’d you do this time?” is how he greets his adult son. “You sure cuss a lot when Rocco’s around” is the Dartmouth-bound smart kid’s astute observation. Seeing as how his dad is compulsive model boat carver forever giving him “Don’t ever settle” lectures on a girl who just used and rejected D.J., that should be a tell for D.J. and his mom.
Ruth, the boozy, unfiltered ex who gets “horny when I’m scared,” cuts to the chase.
“You don’t know him (Vincent) at all!”
The disparate characters are destined to collide in a country house high on a woody hillside in Maine. The tale of how they all got there and what the bad blood here is about is told out of order via flashback “revelations,” rendering it a style we’d call Tarantinoesque. We’d call the callous, amoral and seriously unfunny violence Tarantinoesque, too. But why drag a good if perhaps overpraised filmmaker into this?
From the first spilling of blood, “Riff Raff” grates and goes grimly wrong. Blundering hit men use each other’s names in front of a farm produce store owner, a scene that ends with “A History of Violence” slaughter. It’s repeated later with victims we could describe as “annoying” and overly-helpful.
Neither Davidson nor Murray can make these scenes, or later jokes about “torture” and reasons for wanting to do it pay off. The violence is random, awful and way out of proportion to what sets it off.
There are interesting twists to the plot, but the finale’s a fiasco followed by the clumsiest anti-climax of the new year. And too much of what precedes it is packed with simplistic attempts to let Murray/Coolidge/Davidson and Union do what they’ve done in other movies and TV series.
Davidson’s Lonnie is “a twitchy weasel?” Hardly a stretch.
Union is very good at playing prim, proper and PO’d with just her flashing eyes and a testy line.
“Can I get a word?”
Coolidge is the only one of the lot who manages a laugh, running her “MILF” based career second act through another wringer, struggling to score a giggle here and there at how vulgar, coarse and lowdown one oversexed drunk can be.
“White Lotus” reminds us she can be better than this, as indeed most everybody else here has demonstrated via their earlier credits.
Their director? Not so much.
Rating: R, violence, sexual content, drug use, nudity, profanity
Cast: Bill Murray, Jennifer Coolidge, Gabrielle Union, Pete Davidson, Miles J. Harvey,
Lewis Pullman, Emanuela Postacchini, Michael Angelo Covino and Ed Harris.
Credits: Directed by Dito Montiel, scripted by John Polono. A Roadside Attractions release.
Running time: 1:43
