2025 thus far, seems to be on the trajectory for being the year of mediocre films, and Riff Raff is unfortunately added to this less impressive list. The cast alone grabbed my attention as I had no knowledge of its existence prior to its release, and the performances are solid across the board, yet I'm not convinced that the narrative needed such a bloated cast list. The film is a crime-thriller dark comedy, and here lies the problem. Riff Raff struggles to execute what it set out to be, the tone of the movie just felt weird, bouncing between tense dramatical scenes and quippy comedic moments all too often took me out of the experience. Don't get me wrong the characters are interesting, and some decent exposition is given throughout the story, but I felt this would have made a better mini-series instead of a film as its content feels all too crammed in. Plus, Fargo the TV show (2014) knocked it out of the park when it comes to juggling comedy and cinematic drama and I believe this is what the movie intended to achieve. If they took these exact same cast and characters and allowed more room for them to breathe, you could potentially have a banger of a season 6 under the Frago name - right actors/characters, wrong method. Overall, I was less than impressed with Riff Raff, it's not bad and produces some good characters but I felt they needed a lot more exploration to justify the climax.
