Billionaire Boys Club: What Went Wrong?

When you want to get into films it's important not to just look at the good stuff however tempting that is. Sometimes the best way to teach yourself about filmmaking is to look at the soul crushing dumpster fires and try and work out where it all went wrong.

On the surface Billionaire Boys Club (2018) seemed like it had everything going for it. Having bagged the hot young talent in Ansel Elgort (Baby Driver) and Taron Egerton (Kingsman) and promising a high octane thriller not dissimilar to the hit Wolf of Wall Street based on an intriguing true story then Kevin Spacy got on board... oh.... ah.... right... Kevin Spacy is in this film. And he's playing a leering con-man influencing and manipulating a group of handsome young boys... and it was released after the allegations.

Because of the rightful hostility against Spacy, Billionaire Boys Club only got a limited release. Their reason for releasing it at all was so the contributions of the other cast and crew members would not go unrewarded and quite right too. Just because one jackass is in a film doesn't mean that the months sometimes even years of hard work behind the scenes deserves to go unrecognised. Even so, the limited release brought in a pathetic $618 when it debuted in 11 theaters across the United States. It's Friday launch only brought in $126.

The truth of the matter is this film is never going to earn back its money but does it deserve that status? Did Spacy ruin the prospects of a good film? Could Billionare Boys Club have been the new Wolf of Wall Street?

Welllll... No.

Unfortunately this film has problems beyond Spacy and today I'm going to take a look at them so any filmmakers looking to make a thriller with casual sexism, fake rolex watches and copious amounts of cocaine can maybe... put down one of those things and write something good?

I would say spoilers ahead but lets face it nobody is going to watch this film.

1. The pacing is a hot mess

It's hard to know what is to blame for the pacing of this film. Some would point fingers at the editor who depending what stage in production this was at might have known nobody was going to see it, but for me this issue goes right back to the roots of the story itself.

Billionaire Boys Club was originally a TV mini-series and honestly that format would have worked a lot better for this episodic kind of story. The film feels like a long string of events the first half painfully boring and the second half shallow grave if all the characters in shallow grave were part of One Direction.

The audience is falling asleep during the first half only to be bored for completely different reasons in the second. The characters seem to only exist to take us from one dubious act to the other with no time to make us feel anything.

Apparently the script was written between two people who spent 4 months with it each. Better scripts have been written in less time so I can't put this issue down to rushing but I think the problem here is selection. When dealing with true events you have to figure out what to include and exclude. What parts of this true story are the most dramatically interesting? After watching this film I feel like I know what really happened but it's the same experience I would get from watching a documentary or reading a textbook. Cinema is DRAMA darling, you're going to have to do better than that so turn your bloody metronome off and play around with the pacing, there will be times in the fast parts were things need to slow and times in the slow parts were we need a bit of speed.

2. The characters aren't likable

When I say likable I don't mean they have to be "nice" or "morally good" characters. By likable I mean that I've at least got to want to spend a movie with these guys and be invested in what they're doing so when it all goes tits up and we see their true colours we feel something. What we have in the picture above is a thing called wasted potential.

The film is narrated by Taron Egerton's character Mean Dean. Mean Dean is not the main character but he's an important and probably one of the most interesting characters. He's a savvy businessman with big ambitions and a really twisted outlook. He's not just young and naive, he's young naive and violent with a drug addition problem and a mind that gets more twisted as the story plays out. HOW DID YOU MAKE THIS GUY BORING? Well the pacing screwed this character over big style and because there is little to no exploration of his motives and who this character is we get a pretty surface level performance from Egerton. This character could have been like watching the origins of the Joker as we see his sanity slowly fade away as he crosses more and more lines into psychopathy.

Ansel Elgort's character is even more wasted. Because the film is not narrated by him he feels like a side character even though we spend the most screen time with him. Joe Hunt is a middle class guy who was pushed into this life by a father who wanted success for him and he ran with it until it unraveled out of his control. Unlike the spoiled brats he's trying to get onboard his get-rich-quick scheme he's had a tough life and had to work for the respect that comes naturally to others. He's the character that the audience has more chance of relating to but he never does anything relatable. Actually he has no character outside of what the plot point requires and he's just so bland and boring it's painful. Elgort is a great young actor but I dare you to find a place where his facial expression changes at least once in this film!

3. The narration is dumb

Ah narration. Some may call it lazy writing, an excuse to dump exposition that the filmmakers couldn't figure out how to show creatively, and they would be right! Right off the bat I was confused as to who the main character was meant to be and as the film went on I was more and more confused as to why we needed weirdly timed information dumps from a welsh actor trying to be an American arsehole.

Looking back on this film there is a simple solution that would have made this film SO MUCH BETTER. There's a moment just before the big event goes down where Mean Dean tells the audience that what happens next depends on who you ask. What would have been better is if at this point in the film Dean's narration doesn't match up with what's happening on screen. He's lying. After the events that lead to Joe's arrest we cut and see that he's been talking to police officers this whole time. Not only does the narration now have a narrative purpose but it shocks the audience as Mean Dean walks out of that station at the same time as the people he threw under the bus are brought in... excuse me why wasn't I hired to write this film!

4. Bechdel test? What Bechdel test?

For those who don't know, the Bechdel test is a simple test to measure how women are represented in media. To pass this all you need to do his have two female characters, who talk to each other about something that isn't man candy. It can be argued that depending on a films subject matter the Bechdel test is redundant. This is the Billionaire Boys Club for example not the Billionaire human's club heaven forbid. But the sad thing is that there are female characters in this film that could have been interesting. Emma Roberts plays the artist Sydney, the love interest of Elgort's character. She has one good scene where she hints to Egerton's character that she knows about the murder and fraud. Unfortunately she then leaves the plot forever.

What would have been interesting is if this character had a bit more dimension and we saw her investigating and looking into the activities of her boyfriend along with a friend she trusts. When she finds out about the murder of Spacy's character and has an uncomfortable encounter with Mean Dean she feels like she could be in danger only, now Dean has locked the door and unplugged the phone. Just when we think Dean might kill her, Joe gets back and he has to make a choice either to keep her as a captive or let her go at the risk of her telling the police. Still in love with her he decides to keep her locked in the house while him and Dean go to do their last crime. Just as they leave the house Joe punches Dean, the first indication of their friendship starting to break.

I will accept cash or check.

5. The film looks boring

Colour artist: How many shades of beige do you want in this film?

Director: All of them

Not much to say here. The colours are boring, the cinematography is boring and reveals nothing about the characters. Nuff said.

6. It wants to be Wolf of Wall Street

Hey we all know marketing is really hard! Who can blame paid graphic designers for magic wand tooling around two blokes (with light coming from opposite ends of the room) and sticking them on a yellow background? Grab the text from The Wolf of Wall Street, tweak it and you have a DVD that looks like prime car boot sale material!

Joking aside though this film really wants to be another film. It's like it has a huge Wolf of Wall Street crush to the point it's dressing up like it. Like band groupies it tries to live a similar life, share the same themes and try and make the same jokes but fail to capture what makes the original good... It's a shallow, baby faced skeleton of a better film.

To Conclude

Billionaire Boys Club is an interesting film for multiple reasons. It's like a movie from 50 years ago if it was made today. A film where bad performances were suffocated by bad direction and scripting and then barfed on by external events completely beyond its control.

I'd never recommend this film to anyone seriously but if you're interested at looking at what a bad film looks like as a filmmaker it's perfect. I do feel sorry for the people that worked on this film and had to do the best with what they had. But then again we have to learn from our mistakes and it's not like there's nothing good at all here. A few good lines. The story is definitely there it just needs room to breath. The characters need room to breath which is an important lesson I can take from watching this film.

See, even bad films have their silver linings!