The Samara Weaving fan club has been rather active lately, with Carolina Caroline (now on VOD platforms like Prime Video) being her third movie released in the last four months. She and Kyle Gallner (the Smile films) headline this new lovers-on-a-crime-spree drama from director Adam Carter Rehmeier (Snack Shack and the Gallner-starring Dinner in America). And while it’s clear that the film is cut from some familiar Bonnie and Clyde cloth, the question is whether Weaving and Gallner can help it escape the familiar trappings of the subgenre.
CAROLINA CAROLINE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: We meet Caroline (Weaving) outside a motel, wearing her Bank Robbery Wig And Sunglasses. You know, harsh black Mia Wallace bangs and movie-star knockoff shades you find at the gas station for $6.99. She kind of impulsively points a gun at a man and takes his truck and tears away and then pulls a petty-change scam. You know, the one where you ask a clerk to trade small bills for bigger bills and exchanging bills so much they get confused and you walk out with 10 bucks more than you had when you walked in. Then we jump to THREE MONTHS EARLIER in TEXAS, when and where Caroline has her normal blond hair as she stocks convenience-store shelves with all the enthusiasm of a roadside raccoon with tire tracks on it. She watches as a handsome fella with a goatee/denim jacket combo right off the rack at Dirtbag Coat Factory pulls off the confuse-the-clerk bill switcheroo, then follows him out to his vintage muscle car to… Well, I’m not sure whether she wants to confront him or jump his bones, but both happen, the first now, and the second eventually. Considering they’re the two most attractive people in the film, the latter is inevitable.
Caroline lives with her father Hank (Jon Gries), who’s kind, sweet, soft-spoken, and understanding, unlike most fathers in movies like this, fathers who sit in front of the game swilling brewskis and treating their children like alpaca dung. Savor that bit, because it’s the only non-cliche character in the whole movie. Hank knows his daughter is restless in this 1.5-horse town, and forever troubled by how her mother left for South Carolina, never to be seen again. Caroline was only two at the time. Now, she shares that story, and her simple dream of traveling cross-country to meet her mother, with the dirtbag guy, Oliver (Gallner), after she spots him at the local country bar. They’re mutually smitten. She takes him for a midnight almost-skinny-dip at the local waterin’ hole and it’s L-O-V-E. Oliver drops her off after an all-night thing and says, “Will you go on like 500 dates with me?”
A couple of beats later Caroline’s saying goodbye to her dear daddy and hitting the road with Oliver to submerge herself in his drifter-grifter lifestyle, which is sort of Jack Reacher-esque in the sense that he has no home or luggage, wears the same clothes all the time, and has the coolest car in the tri-county area. “Teach me how to con,” she asks him, biting her lower lip in that innocent, doesn’t-realize-how-sexy-she-is kind of way. He can’t say no. They go from the making-change scam to pickpocketing lessons (hey now) and elaborate shoplifting schemes to a bank card thing and, at her behest, banks. As in robbing them. It’s all about finding “the angle” on “the systems,” in this case, the systems of society and the human mind. Both can be manipulated by shrewd, scheming minds. And they go state to state to state across the South, duffel bags full of cash in the trunk, peeling their tires in the general direction of something as inevitable as the two sexy people in a movie having movie sex: calamity.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Carolina Caroline doesn’t seem to be even trying to escape the shadow of Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands.
Performance Worth Watching: Weaving has been summarily excellent in a variety of scream-queen and nudge-wink comedy roles, but she flexes some tragic-dramatic muscles in Carolina. Her performance is the film’s best component, Weaving drawing us in by exploring the complicated psychology behind Caroline’s series of bad decisions.
Sex And Skin: Some steamy sexytimes with undies on, about a 6.8 on the Movie Heat and Horniness Scale.
Our Take: Carolina Caroline is tonally consistent, confidently acted and directed, and thoroughly watchable. But color me underwhelmed, as William Thomas Dean IV’s screenplay shows little desire to transcend genre tropes. From the robbery-spree montage to the wow-I’m-turned-on-by-doing-crimes sex scenes to Caroline’s deep-seated mommy issues, almost nothing about this story defies expectations. Sure, there’s some depth and substance to Caroline as a character, and Weaving and Gallner show a modicum of sexual chemistry, but neither is enough to elevate the movie above predictable formula.
Rehmeier and Weaving’s efforts are admirable enough, however, to inspire one to reach for an idea: “How do we know if we’re good people pretending to be bad, or bad ones pretending to be good?”, Caroline asks at one point, which dovetails with Oliver’s earlier denial of the existence of free will, when he essentially uses the argument as an excuse to do bad things. Morality exists in gray areas in movies like this, which find us wrestling with characters who are psychologically wounded and therefore sympathetic beneath their more reprehensible actions. But again, this is nothing new .Caroline’s eventual unease with Oliver’s willingness to slide deeper into ethical darkness feels like manifest destiny for unambitious screenplays. Which leaves us believing Carolina Caroline is a bad movie pretending to be a good one.
Our Call: In the pantheon of lovers-on-the-run stories, Carolina Caroline is redundantly redundant. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.