REVIEW:
Riff Raff is a pretty straight forward movie. Yes, there’s a slight twist towards the end, but otherwise and for the most part, what you see is what you get with this one. Bill Murray plays a bad dude. A hitman who has spent his life committing murders, and has no plans to change. It’s a different kind of role for Murray and it surprisingly fits him well.
In fact, this movie packs a pretty powerful cast all around, including Ed Harris, Gabrielle Union, Jennifer Coolidge, Pete Davidson, and Lewis Pullman. But it’s Murray and Ed Harris who are the leads… the two characters with history together.
As the story goes, Harris’ son (played by Pullman,) shows up looking for a place to stay. He’s done something, and now the bad guys are after him. As the movie goes on, we learn what he’s done, and why it’s such a bug problem. The movie is wise to hold back that revelation until about the halfway point of the film.
The movie plays on the premise of something like High Noon, knowing the bad guys are on the way and having a little time to prepare while waiting for them to get there. Only these characters don’t really prepare. It’s not about that. Instead of being action driven, like a premise like they would lead to, this one is more conversational. And it works. There’s a lot of dotting around talking, and for the most part the conversations are pretty solid.
This movie had all the right workings and potential to feel like a one night movie…having the characters arrive at night, or even during the daytime, knowing the villains are arriving that night. It should have felt like it was one of those all one location films… like Clue, with the characters spending the whole film in and around rye house. Instead, the movie takes us away from our main characters to show the hitman at a store, and shows us a flashback to a scene where one character asks another for permission at a bar, and then another scene at the hitman’s kitchen table, and another at a restaurant, and suddenly that one night – one location feeling is gone.
Now, the flashbacks are one hundred percent necessary to tell the story and understand why the characters are in the situation they’re in. So there’s no cutting out those. But what if this movie had been handled like Rashomon, with a rainy day outside, and characters sitting around in the living room talking, telling their story? Then we could cut to flashbacks to show these events, just like the movie does, only after every flashback we’d be right back in that room with the rain pounding on the glass and pouring down the sides of the windows. That could have been a better way to handle this, and give it the claustrophobic, all in one house, feel.
As it is, Riff Raff is okay. None of the characters are especially interesting, and in the case of Jennifer Coolidge, who was so great in her two White Lotus seasons, she’s just plain annoying here. Ed Harris is always great to watch, and he, in particular, does not disappoint here. What works best about this movie are the twists and plot points that it holds back from us, and then the moments when they are revealed. There’s the one in the middle, about what caused all of this carnage, and then one at the end, which helps explain a lot about the relationships we see throughout the film. It’s not a bad movie, but it sure could have been better.