RIFF RAFF (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Riff Raff, Roadside Attractions / Grindstone Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 27, 2025

The characters in Riff Raff come first, which would seem a benefit. The problem, though, is that the characters of John Pollono's screenplay never feel authentic, and there are so many of them that the degree of inauthenticity here becomes overwhelming.

Director Dito Montiel has assembled a very solid cast, at least, so there is a sense of promise as each new character is introduced. With so many characters played by just as many notable actors, the odds would seem that one of them might stand out among the crowd and apart from the familiar plot that does emerge. That kind of bet should be a safe one.

Instead, the central gimmick appears to be that every one of these characters has to possess only one defining characteristic and at least one level of eccentricity to go with it. We could start with any of them, perhaps, especially since the story itself doesn't exactly have a single protagonist to propel the plot. Maybe Pollono's story would have been helped by a trickier or showier or more convoluted narrative, if only so that these characters could fit better within it or come across as more grounded than everything surrounding them.

Let's begin, then, with the character whose narration opens the movie. He's DJ (Miles J. Harvey), a teenager whom we first meet talking about family and how everything that will eventually go wrong in the story has to do with family. It must be bad, since our first glimpse of the teen, a smart kid with an interest in science and making topographical maps, is of him pointing a gun at someone's head.

That man is Vincent (Ed Harris), DJ's adoptive father and the second husband of the teenager's mother Sandy (Gabrielle Union). This raises a few questions about the relationship between Vincent and Sandy, who have quite the age gap and deep differences in personality, and surely, Pollono seems to believe that he answers all of those curiosities by pointing out that Sandy's first husband, DJ's father, was a philanderer who died in a car accident while with another woman. That certainly explains why a woman like Sandy is single, without addressing a single component about how or why a guy like Vincent would be next in line.

To some extent, we should be thankful that the filmmakers breeze past all of this and get right to more complications. The big one that sort of starts everything is the arrival of Vincent's other son Rocco (Lewis Pullman), who shows up at his father's remote Rhode Island cabin in the middle of the night with his pregnant fiancée Marina (Emanuela Postacchini). By the way, Rocco's mother and Vincent's ex-wife Ruth is passed out in the car, too, and because she's played by Jennifer Coolidge, we're at least anticipating some level of peculiarity as soon as she appears on screen.

It takes a surprising amount of time for Pollono to get to the point of why Rocco has come to the cabin. In the meantime, the big mixed family goes through a bunch of predictable and, because the characters are so superficially written, repetitive scenes together. Vincent and Ruth bicker, because she still has feelings for him and he has very much moved on from her. Ruth and Sandy play a passive-aggressive game of trading hushed insults, and while there's some sweetness to DJ wanting to bond with his older sort-of brother, Rocco might be the least developed character of the lot, since his existence in the story really is that he has set in motion without anyone being the wiser.

That leaves, thankfully, only two more major characters. They're a pair of criminals named Lefty (Bill Murray) and Lonnie (Pete Davidson), who are searching for Rocco, take a road trip to find him, and end up killing several innocent people along the way with a degree of casual cruelty that isn't nearly as funny as the filmmakers believe it to be. To be sure, casting Murray and Davidson opposite each other, as both basically play against type (the latter as a calculating assassin and the former as a mob boss—although it's not Murray's first time in such a role), is a clever move. It's a shame their interactions come down to a single joke: watching the two convince themselves, after spending too much time with naïve and/or annoying side players, that murder is the only solution to a current problem.

Eventually, the truth—of Rocco's reason for visiting his estranged father, why Lefty and Lonnie are hunting the young man, how Vincent might help his son, and a couple more things—is revealed. None of it is particularly surprising, of course, because, for as many of them as there are here, these characters are entirely limited to fitting a single purpose in this tale. That's probably the biggest issue with Riff Raff: It doesn't even attempt to make any of these characters into more than just players in this drawn-out game.

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