Billionaire Boys Club

The perception of reality is more real than reality itself!

Year Released: 2018

Director: James Cox

Cast: Taron Egerton, Ansel Elgort, Kevin Spacey and Emma Roberts

This is the second movie that Spacey and Elgort have done together (the other being the excellent “Baby Driver”), but in between the two was the “me too” scandal in America and pretty much every movie with Spacey in it was doomed from that point onwards, with some even completely replacing him.

I could try and come up with some analogy about how it impacted this movie, going in and out of a variety of analysis techniques, but instead I’m simply going to state the fact that this movie only made $168 dollars in the opening weekend of release in America. It not only underperformed, it bombed, and I believe (at this stage I haven’t watched the movie) that this was purely down to Spacey’s involvement.

So anyway, despite the inclusion of Spacey, I still wanted to watch this as it looked like a decent enough film, with Egerton, Elgort and Roberts being decent young talent, so hopefully, it will turn out to be worth the watch. That being said, it does look like a poor attempt to cash in on the success of the excellent “The Wolf of Wall Street”, and if you don’t believe me, below is the more common poster for this film, and the one for the aforementioned, yeah, same shade of that amberish/yellow/orange and what appears to be the same font. It is definite plagiarism.

Plot

Joe (Elgort) and Dean (Egerton) are old friends that run into each other a few years after school, although bugger has been as successful as they would have hoped given their education. Dean does have connections though and invites Joe to a party. Inspired by the lack of true conversation, Joe comes up with a plan to invest it in gold and it pays instant dividends before a market crash.

Despite this, the pair convince people to invest, including millionaire Ron (Spacey). What the investors don’t realise is that it is a ponzi scheme and it is only a matter of time before the issues start.

So, is it basically another version of “The Wolf of Wall Street”?

There are definitely shades of “Wolf of Wall Street”, ranging from a similar opening in which Dean goes on about how much money he earnt and revealing a model wife in revealing clothing, and as I mentioned earlier, one of the posters is remarkably similar, but other than that “Billionaire Boys Club” is a poor substitute for the aforementioned far superior film.

I don’t normally like to compare to other films in my reviews, but it is exceptionally hard not to on this occasion and unfortunately, this pales in comparison. It lacks any of the sharp dialogue, consistently shifting opinions on the characters that you develop and a variety of other factors that made “Wolf on Wall Street” great.

This movie is lifeless and plods along at a tedious pace without ever really getting interesting. In many ways, this reminded me a bit of “Big Short” in that it has all of these references and phrases from the financial industry, but other than the occasional explanation, the average person won’t be able to make sense of it. Then again, I could have just been an idiot and missed it.

The acting is ok, at best, with no-one other than Spacey actually seemingly enjoying their role. Infact, I have to say it but Spacey is comfortably the best part of this film. He revels in his role, whereas no-one else seems to really move out of first gear and give a performance that could be described as anything more than “forced smiles and feigned interest”. No-one is bad, but other than Spacey no-one really stands out.

Even if Spacey wasn’t involved, I don’t think that this film would have done well even without Spacey’s involvement post the “me too” movement”. It’s just not that good.

Summary

This film couldn’t be trying to be “Wolf of Wall Street” more if it tried, but it fails miserably in that respect as it is told in a completely uninteresting and unengaging way. Everything that made “Wolf of Wall Street” great is ignored here.

It is easy to see why this flopped so badly and it has very little to do with the involvement of Kevin Spacey, who, and it seems weird saying this now, is the best thing about this film.

Yeah, just avoid.