Riff Raff

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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Punk musician and director Dito Montiel (“Boulevard”) offers a best intended helping of dark comedy with “Riff Raff,” featuring Jennifer Coolidge from “The White Lotus” and Bill Murray and Pete Davidson from “SNL” fame. With a notable cast the film has energy but by midway the film falls into a pit by multiple violent scenes of double crossing.

DJ (Miles J Harvey) is a bookish black teen that lives with his Mom (Gabrielle Union) and hitman stepfather Vince (Ed Harris). Through episodic flashbacks, Vince learns that his older son Rocco (Lewis Pullman) has killed his former partner Leftie’s son Jonny (Michael Covino) in due self defense, an event involving a shared girlfriend.

When Rocco comes to his father’s house with his father’s ex-wife Ruth (Jennifer Coolidge), Vince knows to expect trouble for company.

Bill Murray has a dry ironic tone as hitman and vengeful dad. He delivers an appropriate Gallows humor turn that satisfies but doesn’t really offer anything new. Pete Davidson is expectedly quirky and hesitant, giving a murderous edge to his nonchalant stoner persona. Jennifer Coolidge is engaging and truly funny. Her spaced out shtick is very familiar too, but she has the best lines.

The most compelling is Miles J Harvey throughout the film as the young son with an unsentimental yet poignant curiosity. He is sincerely humorous precisely because he is genuinely authentic as a straight man, when everyone else feels a bit cartoonish.

For all of the young man’s originality in his character portrayal, it does not express too much by mid-story, and the film gets repetitive with shootings and violence.

The film is in the spirit of a Coen Brothers thriller but it doesn’t possess quite the same magnetism or charge of its original cousin. Murray philosophizes. Davidson smirks. Coolidge wanders around in a haze wanting sex—a 21st century Mae West.

The gore and denouement feels a little cynical and a little mean. The film is a little too processed and formulaic. Where “Fargo” is high quality silk, “Riff Raff” is polyester.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com