In any given scene, Arkansas is at odds with itself. In one corner, we have the plot, adapted from John Brandon’s novel of the same name, which follows the rise of two junior drug dealers who learn the hard way of the violent occupation they are pursuing. In the other corner, we have the framing story of the rise of the mysterious cartel leader in whose service the two young men have found themselves. The two stories are fine on their own, but each is at the service of the other: The flashback structure is so overwhelming in the amount of information it provides us that it comprises nearly half the movie, while the material set in the present day is entirely predicated on the surprises found in the flashbacks.
As a result, Clark Duke’s directorial debut, despite its obvious ambition, falls short in a few critical areas. The first is in choosing its protagonists, which may be a problem of Brandon’s original text but is almost certainly a problem in the approach taken by the director/co-star and his co-screenwriter Andrew Boonkrong. Simply put, Kyle (Liam Hemsworth, who seems lost as the straight-man performer amid the quirkiness of everything else) and Swin (Duke, whose impulses as a comic actor are unfortunately intact to the disadvantage of his character) are not interesting. They are dull as protagonists who find success by stumbling accidentally into it, and they are not worth the emotional labor of caring about them when no one here seems to care about anything.
Our introduction to Kyle and Swin as the squabbling partners with hardly any chemistry doesn’t help matters very much. Kyle barely has any personality beyond his dutiful commitment to the current mission, and that is unwavering throughout, which might explain the casting of Hemsworth as the all-business half of this team. Swin is more of a wild card, so that, when a park ranger (John Malkovich) who is also a corrupt individual within the mysterious drug syndicate lays out specific rules of engagement and of secrecy for the pair to keep operating on his turf, Swin ignores them entirely for the chance to woo a pretty nurse (Eden Brolin) into his inner circle. To recap, we have the stoic one and, in a roundabout way, the goofball.
That doesn’t give us much to work with, so the movie also gives us Frog (Vince Vaughn), the cartel’s secretive leader, who in flashbacks leading up to the events of the present day discovers his own propensity toward violence and secures a place of fearful respect as a crime boss and drug kingpin. Vaughn’s performance is solid as an entryway into his own story, especially as a character counterpoint to Kyle and Swin. Eventually, though, this entire thread reveals itself to be at the mercy of whether we understand enough about these characters to care about them. Since Frog remains a cypher despite the attempt to give him a motivation, which runs against the fact that he never seems to have a moral compass (even a twisted one), the character is a non-starter.
Inevitably, the film settles into a formula, with the two fresh faces in this criminal enterprise meeting something like a fork in their shared path, the veteran kingpin facing a plateau of his own market, and both entities answering that with violent retribution until that avenue fails. It only ends with the climax, which condenses all that business into one way forward for one of these characters. Duke shows promise in his first venture behind the camera, which certainly commits to a specific attitude. The problem with Arkansas is that the attitude in question is of a detached variety, far too laid back and lazy to match its dour subject matter.
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