Riff Raff is a diverting crime comedy whose starry multi-generation cast outshines the script’s well-worn tropes and twists.
Director: Dito Montiel
Writer: John Pollono
Genre: Crime, Comedy
Run Time: 103′
TIFF Screening: September 6-15, 2024
U.S. Release Date: TBA
U.K. Release Date: TBA
There’s nothing new about the premise of Dito Montiel’s Riff Raff. As a time-hopping crime comedy that’s heavy on dialogue and works best when its characters share close quarters, comparisons with Tarantino and the Coens are inevitable. But for the most part, a lack of originality isn’t much of an issue with a cast as strong as this. Ed Harris and Lewis Pullman star alongside Bill Murray and Jennifer Coolidge, two veteran comic actors enjoying late-career renaissances, in this fun but familiar flick.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about family recently,” teenager DJ (Miles J. Harvey) tells us, and Riff Raff explores just about every kind of family you can imagine: biological, chosen, blended, and crime. Nearly 20 years since his mother met Vince (Harris), who he now calls ‘Dad’, DJ is enjoying the family’s annual new year’s trip to their holiday home in the woods. When their idyllic getaway is gatecrashed by Vince’s son Rocco (Pullman), his pregnant girlfriend Marina (Emanuela Postacchini) and his mother, Vince’s ex Ruth (Coolidge), dark and violent histories reveal themselves, as does some very immediate danger, brought about by Rocco’s dealings with the mob.
Once the premise is established, the story hops back and forth between the crisis in the holiday home and the events that have led up to it. The film’s repeated use of flashbacks, often to depict the same or at least concurrent events from multiple perspectives, gives it the air of a murder mystery without the murder… yet. With Bill Murray’s old-school mafioso on the hunt for Rocco and his family, the question isn’t so much ‘whodunnit’ as how, when and why will they?
The film’s approach to spatiality, effectively capturing the claustrophobic setting of the woodland home, is very much in step with the mystery genre, as is its mostly recognisable cast, each playing a certain ‘type’. DJ is the naive, nerdy teen suffering from his first heartbreak, Vince the ex-con trying to put it all behind him, Marina the wise young woman whose attractiveness blinds the others to her smarts, etc. Throughout its external scenes we see a mix of ‘70s mafia and exploitation films, some lovely lens zooms bring both tension and retro indulgence, and brutal violence more suited to modern tastes.
Each performer gets their fair share of the laughs, with Harvey‘s innocent foil – he doesn’t know about his stepdad’s past – the film’s most endearing presence. He and his mother Sandy, played excellently by Gabrielle Union, provide characters worth rooting for in this story of unsavoury individuals. The interplay between Vince’s two wives is some of the film’s best comic work, though Coolidge is otherwise underused and typecast in the catty alcoholic role.
Outshining everyone are Murray and Pete Davidson, the mob boss and his bumbling sidekick, whose work together combines the darkness of their characters’ professions with the humour of the mundane. The pair’s scene with P.J. Byrne and Brooke Dillman as Vince and Sandy’s gullible neighbours is side-splittingly funny.
If we must compare Riff Raff to bottle film-adjacent crime movies of late, and its strict adherence to tropes and conventions insists we do, it’s closer to Drew Goddard’s Bad Times at the El Royale than Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. Like both films, it features an impressive ensemble in a fixed location, but it feels too much like an imitation of better work to really excel. All that said, the film’s cheeky humour should keep most on side right up to its bloody denouement.
Riff Raff was screened at TIFF on September 6-15, 2024.
