William Pimlott really, really does not like The Riot Club

The Riot Club is a dreadful, dreadful film. And as an Oxford student it feels right to insult it using this column. Not only is the film poorly made, full of unnecessary shots of London’s skyline and preposterous paens to a Fanny Hill vision of the 18th century (which make up the very opening scene of the film), but it also fails to miss the (easy, but maybe important) target. The Bullingdon, or the Riot Club, are not successfully condemned in the film.

The timing of the film is terrible. Both new students at Oxford and applicants will see an Oxford that bears very little resemblance to the real world. Students scream down the streets dressed in restoration garb and riding shopping trolleys, parents are paying off tuition loans (aren’t the students the one carrying those debts?) and couples flirt playfully on top of luxurious roofs with views over the High Street. And not a single important cast member is under 25.

The friend I went to see the film with compared coming out of the cinema and back into real Oxford to waking up from a dream where your teddybear becomes a knife-wielding murderer. But you realise that it’s just your girlfriend. The film’s Oxford is a grotesque nightmare.

But out of duty, out of self-flagellating masochism we students flock to see this dreadful film. We cringe, covering our faces as embarrassing dialogues, phoney pieces of slang and absurd plot developments are repeated again and again.

There is a sense in which this could be us preparing ourselves for the future conversations. At the moment it’s often: “You go to Oxford? Isn’t that really expensive?” Now we will be confronted with: “Is it like that? Do you know the Bullingdon?”

I fear that despite the film’s heavy-handed moralising cinematography (often most clearly shown by the villainesque overacting of the cast, but also at the end by the preposterous concluding scene where the bad guy smirks as a brass band plays the national anthem) will not have impacted on the triumph that this film represents for the Bullingdon: they will now be international superbadstars.

Except when I went to see the film there was only one other person apart from my friend in the room. The Riot Club is different to the big summer hit, the film is an inverted Pride (though of course, this being British cinema, the films have more than one actor in common; an Irish gay rights activist becomes a Greek plutocrat).

Instead of do-goodery, we expect nefarious bad guys to be vilified. Instead of feel-good, we demand disgust or at least a clinically detached dismissal of the unacceptable behaviour of a group of entitled young men. Instead we receive a deranged and hyperbolic sequence of barely consequential plot developments, where disbelief (why a murder anyway, aren’t the real events, the trashing of restaurants, enough?) replaces indignation.

It is a failure. But then does Oxford deserve another good artistic portrayal? Perhaps we have already been blessed in at least having Zuleika Dobson and Brideshead Revisited.

Or maybe, and hopefully, the film is so shockingly poor that it will no more represent us than a 13th series episode of Midsomer Murders where a man is burnt alive as a hayman in a bonfire represents some village of affluent rural England.

William Pimlott is a Wadham undergrad