Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Infamous’ on Hulu, a Classic Lovers-on-the-Run Movie, Now With Instagram!

Now on Hulu, Infamous really wants to be a (grits teeth in preparation for a reference to bad country music) modern-day Bonnie and Clyde. Like many movies, it seems. Queen and Slim is a recent one hopping on the couple-on-a-cross-country-crime-spree bandwagon, with excellent results. Wild at Heart, Natural Born Killers and True Romance come to mind. And there comes a point when a movie makes you think of so many other movies, it kind of ceases to be its own movie.

INFAMOUS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist:Blood-stained cash flutters through the air in slow motion. Crouched on the floor, Arielle (Bella Thorne), a teenager, records a video monologue on her phone just as cops show up and stick guns in her face. Then she talks directly at US. Very shocking! FLASHBACK: Arielle wanders home. Bra straps, cigarette, headphones. “Leftover KFC in the fridge,” says her mom, who makes excuses for her deadweight boyfriend who’s making the recliner stink. He tries to hit up Arielle for some weed. Middle fingers. Both of ’em. She plops on her bed, looks at her phone: 49 followers. SO DEPRESSING. She goes to a party, steps in on another girl’s boyfriend, then clobbers the girl during the subsequent fight. There’s video of it of course, and it goes viral, because social media videos in movies either are seen by zero people or half the planet’s population. Next morning: 147 new followers. Things are looking up!

Arielle works a bullcrap job waiting tables at a dumpy diner, where she plays with the gum in her mouth then touches people’s food, then plods home and hides the cash in a wad under her bed, just destined to either A) bankroll her deep yearning to leave shithole Florida and become famous or B) be stolen. She always walks by a dirtboy with his head stuck under the hood of a very loud and conspicuous beat-to-shit muscle car. One day she strikes up a convo. He’s Dean (Jake Manley). She hates her mom for naming her after the Little Mermaid. His dad is a piece of crap. Her dad left one night and never came back. He did time for armed robbery and assault. She believes in fate and karma and “the universe” and stuff like that. He teaches her how to shoot his .45. They kiss the living bejeezus out of each other.

Dean and Arielle have so much in common, they experience consecutive domestic incidents on the same night, as if someone had written it in a movie script, although I’m pretty sure it was just “the universe” at work. They hop in his very loud and conspicuous beat-to-shit muscle car and drive off and realize they have no money and put bandannas over their faces and rob a liquor store and she films the robbery and posts it on Instagram I think and it makes her very horny and as the likes and followers pile up it only encourages her to keep committing crimes because the more crimes they do the more followers she gets. Dean isn’t so sure about this, but for Arielle, it’s not about the money, it’s about the subtextual commentary about social media, so whether they’re driving a very loud and conspicuous beat-to-shit muscle car is totally moot.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Infamous answers the burning question, what if Terrence Malick’s Badlands was more like a Lana Del Rey video?

Performance Worth Watching: Thorne shows flashes of charisma, but is hemmed in by a thin, overly familiar screenplay.

Memorable Dialogue: “We’re not f—ed. We’re famous.” — Arielle finds the silver lining in being wanted criminals

Sex and Skin: Some PG-13 mashery.

Our Take: So after the first robbery, Arielle says, “Baby needs a gun.” Cut to the two of them shopping for pistols on the internet: “It can’t be this easy!” she says. That’s the only time Infamous does anything with any semblance of wit. Not much of this film is particularly convincing, and it suffers from a significant yuck factor as it attempts to frame its protagonists as morally pliable fodder to be consumed by the boundlessly hungry mob-collective social media beast. Mumbly Dean and Arielle, the queen of DGAF, aren’t particularly fun to hang around with, and their wannabe tragic love story is DOA.

Stylistically, writer/director Joshua Caldwell cribs a thick ’80s-synth cough-syrup-pop soundtrack from Drive and smears it atop some dreamy montages; and the social media commentary Arielle reads on her phone BLAMS across the screen in gigantic, obnoxious pink text. Why? Because it’s SHOCKING, of course! Influencers are actually the influenced! The tables are turned! And everyone is awful!

Dean doesn’t really understand why Arielle’s broadcasting their every lawbreaking move, but he goes with it anyway because nobody bothered to write anything to put inside his skull. Arielle is clearly filling the void left by her neglectful, disinterested parents with social media likes, which are poison doled out by anonymous people who choose to be morally detached from everything they see on their phones. It concludes on a sloppy, confusingly ambiguous note, evidence that nobody could hash out a creative way of wrapping up this plot, so they just opted for cynicism.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Who’s in the mood for a misanthropic movie about hopelessness and Instagram? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

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 Infamous on Hulu