The opening voiceover of this Southern-fried crime story tells us that Kyle (Liam Hemsworth) doesn’t care about material things, so it’s odd that he should end up risking life and liberty to traffic drugs for someone he’s never met – but then, Arkansas, the directorial debut of Clark Duke (Clark in the US version of The Office) does a lot more philosophising than it does sense-making.
In the South, the narration continues, organised crime is not that organised; it’s more a loose affiliation of deadbeats and scumbags. Those sentiments are straight out of the cult Southern Gothic novel on which Arkansas is based, but although author John Brandon’s elegiac, soft-boiled prose and ramshackle plotting suited the printed page, it has confounded Duke and his co-screenwriter Andrew Boonkrong in their attempt to bring the book, which they clearly love, to the screen.
Duke gifts himself the better of the two lead roles, radiating offbeat Steely Dan energy with his long hair, wispy moustache and garish clothes, leaving Hemsworth with a character description that might as well just read “handsome” — although it’s Duke who gets the girl, an underwritten role for Eden Brolin (daughter of Josh).
The problem is not only that nothing really happens, but that when it does, any tension is dissipated by cutting to a B-story.
The problem is not only that nothing really happens — and not in a way that artfully explores the essentially humdrum lives of the criminal underclass — but that when it does, any tension is dissipated by cutting to a B-story. Worse, instead of deleting the less interesting scenes (two hours feels like three), Duke overcompensates by slathering them with either Devendra Banhart’s Morricone-esque score, or scandalously bad covers of American classics by The Flaming Lips.
It isn’t a total loss. John Malkovich, Vince Vaughn and Michael K. Williams are good enough to shine through even the blandest direction, but even they can’t save this disorganised affiliation of deadbeats and scumbags.