The Inexplicably Star-Studded Riff Raff is a Half-Assed Nothing Burger of a Movie

Finally, a movie that will make you sit up slowly and mutter, "Meh"

Watching Riff Raff in a movie theater felt strange because it should have gone direct-to-video or direct-to-streaming. Riff Raff is redolent of the fare I wrote about when I started writing video reviews for The A.V. Club.

I wrote about many direct-to-video joints in the late 1990s for The A.V. Club. One of my favorite subgenres was Tarantino knockoffs.

Video store shelves were full of profane, hyper-violent crime comedies filled with hard-boiled storytelling, flashy dialogue, and colorful crooks prone to monologues and snappy banter.

These offspring of Pulp Fiction and Resevoir Dogs often had perversely star-studded casts filled with familiar faces and recognizable names who didn’t want to miss out on being in the next indie sensation.

Riff Raff boasts a cast so impressive that you can’t help but wonder if they all signed on after reading a different script because it’s hard to imagine anyone getting particularly excited about the film’s non-starter of a screenplay.

The latest directorial effort from novelist Dito Montiel, who made a high-profile debut with an adaptation of his 2001 memoir Recognizing Your Household Saints before embarking on an aggressively undistinguished career as a director, Riff Raff stars Bill Murray, Ed Harris, Pete Davidson, Gabrielle Union, and Jennifer Coolidge.,

Harris replaced Brian Cox, while Murray took over for Dustin Hoffman, so this could have been made with an equally impressive but different cast.

Riff Raff is an undistinguished crime comedy-drama with some notable distinctions. It is the first pairing of Ed Harris and Bill Murray, actors of note. It similarly marks the first collaboration between Murray and Davidson, offbeat Saturday Night Live mega-hunks from different generations.

Murray has a sizable dramatic role that finds him in character actor mode. We know he’s not just phoning it in or doing his trademark shtick because he has a pronounced accent. Murray did a lot of accents, voices, and character work on Saturday Night Live, but they are less common in his film work.

You don’t come across a movie starring Pete Davidson every day! He only makes three or four movies a year, and I end up reviewing every last one. Don’t get me wrong; I like Davidson, within reason.

Readers of this newsletter with very strong, weird memories might recall that Davidson’s portrayal of Petey, the villain turned anti-hero turned hero of Dog Man, moved me to tears. I love that character, film, and performance.

If you only see one movie where Pete Davidson plays a criminal that’s currently in theaters, you should see Dog Man.

Ed Harris stars as Vincent, a man of violence who became a man of peace and left his old life behind to be a loving husband to Sandy (Gabrielle Union) and stepfather to DJ (Miles J. Harvey), a good-natured, baby-faced young man.

Union and Harvey are black. Everyone else in the cast is white. Riff Raff seems uninterested in addressing race in any way, which registers less as colorblindness than as cowardice.

Vincent thinks that he’s left his old life behind, but when his no-account fuck up of a son ends up killing the progeny of a powerful criminal, his past comes back to haunt him.

Jennifer Coolidge wanders about the proceedings in a stoned, horny haze as Vincent’s sexually voracious ex-wife and the mother of the son who gets his old man into trouble.

Riff Raff keeps the drama involving Vincent’s family, nuclear and otherwise, separate from Davidson and Murray’s scenes in a matter not unlike McDonald’s McDLT, which famously (to me at least), kept the hot side hot and the cool side cool.

Western civilization peaked with this invention, but we foolishly rejected it. It’s all been downhill since then.

Davidson and Murray’s conversational killers do a whole lot of talking. They talk and talk and talk. Then they do some more talking. Sometimes they kill people, but mostly they’re just chatterboxes.

Riff Raff proves maddeningly non-cinematic. For an action-comedy, it’s suspiciously light on action and comedy but long on scenes where people have conversations while seated.

The film’s two threads come together in the third act when the killers show up at Vincent’s home with a murderous agenda, and dark secrets spill out artlessly.

I see Riff Raff as a direct-to-streaming obscurity that accidentally received a pity theatrical release, not because it’s terrible or doesn’t have enough going for it to merit debuting in theaters rather than on Netflix.

Riff Raff isn’t terrible. On paper, it has a lot going for it, particularly regarding a wildly overqualified cast. The movie isn’t particularly good. It’s not particularly bad. It’s not much of anything. It’s a nothing burger of a movie I’ve half-forgotten despite having seen it just a day or two ago.

Pete Davidson makes a lot of movies.

This is certainly one of them.

Two and a half stars out of Five