Film Review: Billionaire Boys Club (2018)
Few can 'boast' of having fallen from the top to the bottom as swiftly as Kevin Spacey, who, less than a decade ago, was the Hollywood equivalent of a deity, only to be treated like radioactive waste today by all those who worshipped him. The same could be said of the audience, at least judging by the performance of his 2018 film, Billionaire Boys Club, at the box office, which earned just $618 in ticket sales – a figure which seems pitiful even when you consider the film was only shown in ten theatres. And, of course, Kevin Spacey is solely to blame for this, given that many critics, who before the whole sexual abuse scandal would have lifted him to the skies, now consider their moral duty to bury his film and thus send a clear message to all future Hollywood 'players' who fancy playing at being Harvey Weinstein. All of this is, of course, rather unfair on director James Cox and the rest of the cast who, through no fault of their own, had to watch a film into which they had poured money, effort, and talent end up in the septic tank. But even if you account for this injustice and ignore the whole Spacey brouhaha, that doesn't mean Billionaire Boys Club is a good film.
The film, also served as co-written by Cox, is based on true events that took place in 1980s Los Angeles and became major scandals and media circuses of the era. They were set in motion by Joe Hunt (Ansel Elgort), a young but ambitious financial whizz who, despite his humble origins, attended an elite school for the children of wealthy and influential parents from Beverly Hills. In 1983, after a chance encounter with his old school friend and the film's narrator, Dean Karny (Taron Egerton), Joe hits upon the idea of combining his stock market skills with money provided by his old schoolmates, who see this as a chance to finally enjoy a luxury they've earned themselves, rather than one granted by their parents. The result is an investment fund called the Billionaire Boys Club, whose members very quickly begin to amass enormous wealth, and then spend it even faster, throwing their money around with abandon in one of the world's most snobbish cities. However, the brilliant results Hunt achieved were not a consequence of his genius, but rather of his cavalier attitude towards business ethics, creative accounting, and techniques no different from pyramid schemes. In his efforts to pay back his friends and investors, Hunt is forced to borrow money and thus encounters Ron Levin (Spacey), a well-padded and even better-connected financier who is supposed to become his partner. Although both are deeply impressed with one another, their relationship will not end well and instead will become one of the most spectacular criminal cases in California's history.
The case of Joe Hunt and his friends became the subject of a 1987 mini-series in which Hunt was played by Judd Nelson, who, in this film, appears in the small role of Hunt's father. This new version, while not looking like a particularly big-budget film at first glance, can boast a rather interesting cast, where alongside young talents like Elgort and Egerton, there is also room for veterans like the now-unrecognisable Cary Elwes in the role of Andy Warhol. Cox can also be commended for managing, despite limited resources, to quite effectively reconstruct the 1980s, not just through music and fashion, but also through the zeitgeist, at least when it comes to the arrogant, greedy spoilt brats of the so-called 'Decade of Greed'. However, when it comes to weaving all this into a coherent story, Cox is far less successful, and numerous scriptwriting deficiencies become apparent. This is most evident in the fact that Cox didn't even attempt to explain how Hunt's 'pyramid' actually functioned or how and why it ultimately collapsed. Inevitable comparisons to The Wolf of Wall Street will, of course, be to the detriment of Billionaire Boys Club, although, in the interest of truth, it should be noted that finance, or white-collar crime, is not only complicated but also rather un-cinematic, even for a maestro like Scorsese, for whom Wolf isn't among his better films. However, Cox made the film worse with a completely unnecessary subplot involving Hunt's girlfriend, played by Emma Roberts, and also by rushing or relegating some of the story's potentially most fascinating elements, primarily those relating to the court trials, to the closing credits. Billionaire Boys Club could have been a very good film, but it isn't, and one of the greatest ironies is that the ostracised Spacey, who delivered yet another brilliant acting performance here, has the least to do with that failure."
RATING: 4/10 (+)
(Note: The text in the original Croatian version is available here.)
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