Billionaire Boys Club (2018) Review

Billionaire Boys Club tells a true story about Joe Hunt (Ansel Elgort), an ambitious entrepreneur who join forces with tennis pro Dean Karny (Taron Egerton) to establish an investment-and-social club known as the BBC in 1983. Along with a financial assistance from some of their wealthy former classmates, their get-rich-quick “investment” scam quickly becomes the talk of the town in the L.A. social scene.

But things eventually get out of hand when Ron Levin (Kevin Spacey), a Beverly Hills con artist who made a huge investment on the BBC turns out to be a complete fraud.

Greed, money, fraud, life in the fast lane… it’s like revisiting Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street all over again. Except in Billionaire Boys Club, co-writer and director James Cox (Wonderland) made it more like a toned-down, indie version of the aforementioned movie.

Sure, it doesn’t have the star power like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street. But at least, Billionaire Boys Club is thankfully blessed with a top-notch young cast led by the charismatic duo of Ansel Elgort and Taron Egerton.

Still, it turns out that Kevin Spacey steals most of the show here in his showy supporting turn as Ron Levin. It’s the kind of slithery role that he is always known for. His performance even reminds me of his earlier movie called Swimming with Sharks back in 1994. It’s just too bad that Hollywood couldn’t care less about anything related to Kevin Spacey these days, thanks to his high-profile sexual misconduct allegation which instantly ruined his once-illustrious acting career.

While James Cox manages to make good use of his ensemble cast, his overall direction and screenplay is pretty much a standard-issue rise-and-fall true-story biographical drama.

Not a great movie by any means, but for an independent feature that arrived with little fanfare, I’m quite surprised with the result here.