It’s been a big week for actor Brett Cullen. First, he appeared in Todd Phillips’s Joker as Batman’s doomed father, Thomas Wayne. Now, this week, he plays yet another despicable businessman as the lead in writer-director Devon Parks’ The Riot Act. And while Joker is a huge box office success of questionable merit, unfortunately, neither film is quite deserving of Cullen’s talent.
Set in 1903, Cullen plays Dr. Willard Pearrow, a physician who also owns the town theater. When we meet Willard, he’s determined to stop Henry (Jeremy Shouldis), a married opera singer popular at the theater, from running away with his daughter Allye (Lauren Sweetser). After failing to keep them apart, Willard confronts them at the train station, shooting and killing Henry while Allye flees on the train. She returns two years later disguised as a vaudeville performer intent on avenging Henry by killing her father only to realize that Henry’s ghost–dressed in the same outfit he died in but wearing a burlap sack as a mask–may already be driving her father mad.
Given that plot description, it seems obvious that the audience is supposed to sympathize with Allye and, perhaps, the ghost or real person haunting her father. However, watching the film, that’s not so clear. Mostly, that’s because Cullen is far and away the best actor in the film. He plays a rich bastard well and mean as Willard is to everyone, he’s compelling in every scene. When he practices a speech in the mirror about how much he misses his daughter, fake tears and all, we know he’s a sociopath, but Cullen’s performance is so good that it almost doesn’t matter. By comparison, Sweetser is saddled with an accent she can’t quite pull off and very little character work and it remains hard to connect with the character’s emotional journey.
Frankly, except for Brandon Keener as another rich bastard, most of the performances aren’t remotely as compelling as Cullen’s and it not only leaves the audience grasping to find a protagonist but makes the narrative less convincing. That’s particularly true of the person eventually revealed to be the ghost. They’re not only not up to Cullen’s level, but stuck playing a character whose motivations don’t quite make sense. While viewers who’ve seen lots of horror or mystery films will likely guess who the masked ghost is well before their identity is revealed, suffice to say here that they’re driven to it not only because they witnessed the shooting, but for a more personal reason that isn’t revealed until the film’s final moments.
However, while Allye returns to kill her father, the vigilante only wants to scare him. Though that lack of violence initially seems admirable, it begs the question: what’s the vigilante’s endgame? Outside of platitudes about the privilege of the rich, Parks never really provides one and it’s not only difficult to understand why the vigilante cares so much but to agree with them when they scold Allye’s desire to kill. Sure, Allye may have grown up with money, but she’s made her way in the world without it since running away and the moment when Parks tries to suggest that’s partially what she gets for choosing love over becoming a doctor like her father wanted is absurd not just for the time period, but because it’s counter to everything we know about Willard’s sense of propriety.
What ultimately keeps The Riot Act from working isn’t its villains but its hero. Parks waits too long to justify his hero’s actions and assumes the audience will sympathize with his reasons above Allye’s–or at all–rather than actually convince us to. The result is a film with a muddled message about income inequality that also feels embarrassingly thoughtless about the way privilege and gender would intersect in the chosen time period. Instead, Parks assumes that because the hero is a poor boy with a largely unjustified victim complex, that the audience will sympathize with him. Frankly it’s a lot like Joker in that way. Take that as you will.
