Billionaire Boys Club (2018)

Directed by: James Cox | 108 minutes | biography, drama | Actors: Ansel Elgort, Kevin Spacey, Taron Egerton, Emma Roberts, Ryan Rottman, Jeremy Irvine, Thomas Cocquerel, Bokeem Woodbine, Barney Harris, Waleed Zuaiter, Suki Waterhouse, Billie Lourd, Judd Nelson, Tony Taplin, Fuschia Sumner, Wayne Pére, Verna Cornelius, Jered Blanchard

The higher your star shines in the sky, the harder you can thunder from it. That’s what Kevin Spacey found out when his name was mentioned in October 2017 in a #MeToo scandal that got bigger by the day. Spacey has been recognized as one of the best actors of his generation for three decades, with a collection of awards on the mantel that will blow your mind. Suddenly there was nothing left of that reputation. But it wasn’t just the accumulation of charges for sexually inappropriate behavior and assault that harmed the actor, it was also the way Spacey reacted to them that rapidly dwindled his fan base. To the statement of ‘whistleblower’ Anthony Rapp, who revealed that he had been assaulted by the then 26-year-old Spacey at the age of fourteen, he replied with his coming out as gay. A response that was clearly intended as a diversion from what really mattered. After Rapp, at least eight other men said they had been approached by Spacey in a sexually inappropriate way. Reason enough for Netflix to end the successful series ‘House of Cards’, in which Spacey played the role of the megalomaniac Frank Underwood, and to cancel the film ‘Gore’, a biopic about screenwriter Gore Vidal starring Spacey. . Director Ridley Scott decided to re-shoot the scenes in his already completed but unreleased feature film ‘All the Money in the World’ which featured Spacey but with Christopher Plummer as the wealthy businessman J. Paul Getty.

Has Kevin Spacey’s career finally come to an end? Then ‘Billionaire Boys Club’ (2018) by director James Cox is the last somewhat significant production in which he plays a role. Cox enjoys filming true stories – “Wonderland” (2003), for example, was his take on the demise of porn star John Holmes, and focuses on the events seen in the much more successful “Boogie Nights” (1997) from Paul Thomas Anderson – and the Billionaire Boys Club account of a young con man calling himself Joe Hunt naturally appealed to him immensely. Hunt’s story was already made into a miniseries in 1987, starring Judd Nelson and Ron Silver. Nelson can be seen here in a tiny cameo as Hunt’s father, who is played in this film by Ansel Elgort (‘Baby Driver’, 2017 – also with Spacey). Joe grows up as a child in a typical American middle-class family in a wealthy neighborhood of Los Angeles. His classmates are all rich kiddos with designer clothes and expensive cars who only have to hold out their hands to their fathers if they want something. That image triggers Joe, years later, to try to realize the American dream of the self-made millionaire. If that doesn’t work in a fair way, he’ll bluff his way through, that’s his strategy. He gets help from his old school friend Dean Karny (Taron Egerton, who also acts as an omniscient narrator), who is better with the rich kids and manages to get them involved in a non-existent investment project without difficulty. When they team up with influential investor Ron Levin (Kevin Spacey), things skyrocket. The boys think they’ve made it through with their Billionaire Boys Club, until things collapse as quickly as they started and blood is even spilled to prevent the deception from coming out.

On paper, the Joe Hunt story reads like a boy’s book; no wonder that many filmmakers would like to work with this true story. However, James Cox’s elaboration leaves a lot to be desired. A comparison with films such as ‘Wall Street’ (1987) by Oliver Stone and ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ (2013) by Martin Scorsese is easily made, but ‘Billionaire Boys Club’ falls short of those films in every way. The beginning, in which the characters are introduced, is still somewhat hopeful, but once the poorly explained scam starts it is clear that the makers have no idea where they want to go with their film. The flat characters are clearly the result of a shaky script, because it’s not the effort of Elgort and Egerton. Emma Roberts shows up as an artist who hooks up with Hunt, but her role adds little to nothing (other than Cox has an excuse to have Rosanna Arquette come in a cameo as her mother). The 80’s references are not of the air, but it could have been a little more subtle. The low point – especially in view of the reputation that Spacey now has – is when Ron Levin brags with an unrecognizable Cary Elwes as Andy Warhol about what a bungler Jean-Michael Basquiat is and about the size of entertainer Milton Berle’s genitals. . Spacey’s presence is uncomfortable. He dominates every scene in which he appears and knows how to credibly portray a villain like no other. But that dominance, compelling presence, the unreliable character of his character Ron Levin and the fact that he is surrounded by ‘broekies’ like Elgort and Egerton constantly make you ask: how close is this character actually to the real Spacey?

Billionaire Boys Club is a superfluous remake that will go down in history as the last film Kevin Spacey worked on before the bomb exploded around him and his reputation shattered. It’s a messy film in which the fragments are largely stitched together like a patchwork, in which it is difficult to arouse sympathy for anyone and in which an attempt is made to condone Joe Hunt’s role in the scam and the ensuing bloodshed. The film states that one bad choice of his eventually led to a lot of bad decisions by others. Like he’s a kid playing a game that’s gotten a little out of hand. That is a little nuanced view of reality, so the reliability of the story also leaves something to be desired.