117 min | R | May 5, 2020 | Lionsgate
Two low-level drug couriers work the back roads of the South for a boss they never see. One bad delivery turns the whole operation against them. Everybody in this movie wants to be in a better one.
Kyle and Swin run product up and down the highways of Arkansas for a faceless drug network. They take orders, keep their heads down, and pretend to be park rangers as cover. A delivery goes wrong and the two of them get pulled deeper into the organization they barely understand. Clark Duke structures the film in titled chapters and shuffles the timeline to trace how the operation built itself across decades. The film wants to be a generational crime saga about how a dealer named Frog turned a small hustle into an empire.
Liam Hemsworth plays Kyle as a man who has decided that talking less keeps him alive. He underplays everything and the flatness reads as caution rather than depth. Clark Duke plays Swin as the chatty half of the pair, the one who falls for a local woman named Johanna and starts imagining a future. Vince Vaughn plays Frog with a drawl and a paunch and a salesman’s patience, and he is the most alive person on screen. John Malkovich turns a middle manager named Bright into a man who would rather garden than kill, and the contradiction gives the film its few real surprises.
Duke directs his first feature and co-writes with Andrew Boonkrong from John Brandon’s novel. He shoots the Arkansas backroads and motel rooms in flat daylight that drains any romance from the crime. The chapter cards and the time jumps borrow the architecture of Tarantino and the Coens without the propulsion that makes those structures pay off. The score leans on Southern rock cues that announce mood instead of building it. Michael Kenneth Williams appears as a fixer named Almond and Vivica A. Fox surfaces in the network’s history, and both deserve more screen time than the fractured structure allows.
The film mistakes a complicated timeline for a complex story. The Frog chapters carry genuine interest because Vaughn finds a real person inside the criminal. The Kyle and Swin material around them stays inert because the leads never generate the friction that a buddy crime picture needs. Duke has a feel for place and a good ear for how these men talk. He has not yet figured out how to make their fates matter.