Mark Reviews Movies: INFAMOUS (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 11, 2020

Writer/director Joshua Caldwell doesn't lose the point in Infamous, but he certainly confuses the message just enough. The movie, a modern-day story about lovers on a cross-country crime spree, is mostly about obsession with social media and how it can make anyone with enough followers and "likes" relatively famous. One wants to look at Caldwell's vision of an amoral and self-absorbed social-networking climber as satire, but it only seems like a matter of time before the movie's story is brought to life by someone desperate for online attention.

That's not an attack on the movie, which doesn't paint Arielle (Bella Thorne), a Florida teenager with dreams of stardom, as a hero. Caldwell and Thorne, whose performance here is downright chilling at times, don't even give Arielle the benefit of the slightest degree of sympathy. Everything about her life points to misery and hardship. She works as a server at a local diner, and after a shift, she adds her tip money to a roll of cash in a box under her bed. It's her escape fund—to get out of this little town, filled with little people with miniscule ambitions and petty concerns.

Her mother (played by Marisa Coughlan) is emotionally distant and physically absent. The mother's boyfriend (played by Billy Blair) sits planted in a chair watching TV, asking Arielle for weed, and making creepy statements about the teenage girl. The turning point for our protagonist arrives when her escape fund goes missing. Knowing it was the mother's boyfriend, she interrupts the couple mid-coitus with an accusation. He denies it. The mother defends him.

Arielle leaps on to the bed to attack him, and when the boyfriend pushes her into the wall, she says she'll kill him. Her voice in this moment isn't just angry, empty threat. There's an almost demonic quality to the raspy yell of her pronouncements. In that moment, we get a glimpse of her callous nature and believe that, if given the chance and any old reason, she might be capable of following through on such a threat.

Such moments are vital here. Arielle's story could be seen as some kind of twisted fantasy of wish-fulfillment or could be told with a satirical tone that keeps us at a distance from the character and the consequences of her quest for fame. Caldwell's premise—that a teenager would plan a trip from Florida to Hollywood, robbing various stores along the way and creating a social media account to record her crimes—is exaggerated just enough (It is for now, at least) that we can see it as a mild form of satire. His approach to the material, though, plays it straight. As a result, the consequences matter, and the character isn't glamorized—nor is the threat of her single-minded, desperate, and increasingly violent attempts to become an online celebrity undermined.

The other half of the crime duo is Dean (Jake Manley), currently on probation and living with his abusive father. After crossing paths a few times, the two hit it off well, despite Dean's disinterest in the world of the internet.

After Arielle discovers that her cash is missing, she goes to Dean's house to run away with him. Instead, she finds her new boyfriend in a scuffle with his old man. When Dean shoves his father to protect Arielle, the father ends up dead. Now, the couple definitely has to run—to Los Angeles, according to Arielle's plan.

To obtain some money, the two rob a gas station. Arielle records it on her phone, and the rush of the crime is only increased for her when she posts the video to a newly created anonymous social media account. Overnight, the account has thousands of followers, and as they keep robbing gas stations and marijuana dispensaries along the way, the number is in the millions.

At its best, the movie is a cold and hard crime story, as well as an insightful examination of Arielle and the way her unwavering focus on online popularity puts her mind in a place between reality and her online presence (The movie's colors become bolder as the crime spree progresses). She's always on her cellphone, even when it threatens her plan and often ignoring Dean. She may make out and have sex with her boyfriend, but there's never any doubt that her real partner-in-crime is that phone.

Things escalate in ways one would predict and in ways that shock us out of any impression that there's some kind of outlaw romanticism to this story. As Arielle becomes more involved in the robberies and shoots a cop when she suspects the joyride is finished, Caldwell becomes even more steadfast in the character's antipathy for reality. The body count rises, first to keep from getting caught and then to an innocent guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It's disturbing, but Caldwell unfortunately fumbles much of his message in the third act, as the outlaws abduct one of their followers and especially with a climactic robbery. The first of those scenes seems to go out of its way to evade any kind of purpose, and the climax invents a few ways to smooth the edges of Arielle's character. They don't need smoothing, and after everything that we've seen of the character throughout Infamous, she doesn't deserve it, either.

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