Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Arkansas’ On Amazon Prime, an Overtly Ironic Crime Comedy That Makes Us Nostalgic for Tarantino Rip-offs

Newly available for Amazon Prime subscribers, Arkansas is crime-caper-comedy directed, starring and co-written by Clark Duke, best known for his goofy supporting roles in Sex Drive, Hot Tub Time Machine and Kick-Ass. The film shuttled from a canceled SXSW premiere to home viewing for the quarantined masses, who may be lured in by its highly skilled ensemble cast, and may take a shine to its post-Tarantino quirks.

ARKANSAS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Kyle (Liam Hemsworth) is a cog in a rickety machine, and he seems OK with that. In a drawling-noir voiceover, he says he runs drugs for a mysterious entity known as Frog — but also reveals that here in the south, there aren’t any big organizations like the Mafia or nothin’. It’s just a bunch of scumbums and dirtclods making their way. (I’m paraphrasing here.) His next job is to schlep some junk to Arkansas with a goofus named Swin (Duke). They’re an odd couple: Kyle wears jeans and a scowl and don’t take no guff, and is a man of about 38, maybe 39 words. Swin has a set of jabberjaws on him, and with his godawful mustache and kaleidoscopic wardrobe, he’d blend in nicely at a hipster-clown convention.

At their destination, Kyle and Swin encounter the middleman in the operation, a park ranger named Bright (John Malkovich). He puts them up in crappy trailers adjacent his cushy home, keeping them on hand for their product-distribution gigs. The trickle-down chain of command goes like so: Frog gets a middlewoman named Her (Vivica A. Fox) the goods, passes them to Bright, who gives them to Kyle and Swin, who drive over state lines and come back with the dough. The narrative indulges lengthy cutaway flashbacks to how the entire shebang began back in the ’80s, when Frog (Vince Vaughn) got his start with Almond (Michael Kenneth Williams), a dealer working behind the front of a fireworks outlet, and grew the operation into a relatively lucrative moneymaker, alongside his two burly right-hand men, Tim (Brad William Henke) and Thomas (Jeff Chase).

So all goes well and nobody dies, just life doing what life does. No! As happens in every movie about a couple of drug-peddling dudes who always have a clever thing or three to say, a deal goes to shit, and Kyle and Swin sort of end up taking on a larger role in the business not because they’re shrewd or ambitious, but because they happen to exist in the right situation at the right time, and they just ride it and don’t think too hard about it, because they’re not quite capable of thinking too hard about anything. Swin somehow picks up nice lady Johnna (Edin Brolin) in a Piggly Wiggly parking lot with the line, “Do you like creepy?”, and the three of them are company and absolutely nothing ever catches up to bite them in the ass. Nope. Not at all.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The stuff Gen-Xers flocked to in the late ’90s, hoping to get a whiff of a taste of the magic of Pulp Fiction and Fargo. You know, movies like 2 Days in the Valley, Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, Love and a .45, A Simple Plan and Red Rock West. (Which reminds me — have you revisited Red Rock West lately? You damn well should.)

Performance Worth Watching: I liked Brolin, playing an earnest, if underwritten character (more on earnestness in a minute) who gives the movie the small shot of humanity it needs to keep it from floating away into an emotionless void.

Memorable Dialogue: The script tries realllllll hard to be the shepherd. Er, I mean, it tries realllllll hard to be quotable at all times, for better or worse. I’ll go with this zinger via Her: “I like boys like y’all, that don’t get hung up on having a long life.”

Sex and Skin: Brief toplessness is all.

Our Take: Are we at the point where we’re nostalgic about Tarantino and Coen Brothers rip-offs? Could be. Duke and Andrew Boonkrong’s time-hopping screenplay is chopped into chapters with title cards reading “One Way Trips” and “Boredom is Beautiful” and such; the film could/should be subtitled A Comic Tragedy in Five Parts. Its retro-mash soundtrack cues are all but copped from Kill Bill. The oafs-in-over-their-heads has a distinct Raising Arizona/Burn After Reading vibe. And if I see another scene of bloody violence set to a tonally disparate easy listening song — in this case, a Flaming Lips cover of Johnny Lee’s “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places<” — it’ll be the 223rd time too many.

So just as water is a thing you’ll find in the ocean, irony is a key tonal component of Arkansas. And frankly, in 2020, in these quantities, irony is a stale bowl of Cheerios, a tough chew no matter how much milk you dump on it. More than anything, this is the Era of Earnestness; detachment is a dinosaur, and this movie stands at many arm’s lengths.

Hemsworth plays his no-bull character at an incongruent angle to the rest of the movie, straight-facing his line readings while Duke smirks and Malkovich scenery-chews and Vaughn deadpans as Vaughn does. It’s a weird conglomeration of talent that never really congeals into something greater than its parts, and Williams and Fox’s parts are disappointingly miniscule. Duke shows some ambition as a writer and director, but the screenplay is overwritten and thematically hollow, stumbling on its tippy-toe prance along the fine line between amusing and irritating.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Arkansas is a try-hard exercise in overly self-aware cleverness.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Watch Arkansas on Amazon Prime