"Carolina Caroline" Review

 I'm getting tired of bemoaning the inability of Samara Weaving to get the breakthrough role she deserves. I'm behind on my write-ups for Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (7/10) and Over Your Dead Body (5/10), but it's coincidental that my last posted review for one of her movies before those was just 11 months ago for the disappointing Eenie Meanie (5/10, stream/cable) because Carolina Caroline is almost the same movie and also fails.

Weaving plays Caroline, a young woman in a nowhere Texas town who is taken with a grifter, Oliver (Kyle Gallner), who scams her boss at the gas station by pulling a grift involving making change. She chases him to his car and gets the money back, but it's obvious these two are going to be hooking up pretty quickly. In short order she's pulling the scams herself and so it's time to take the crime show on the road, stepping up to pickpocketing, bank fraud, and when that's not exciting enough, actual bank robberies across small southern towns while they road trip eastward towards South Carolina. Naturally, the fun and games come to a screeching halt when a robbery goes sideways with the law hot on their tails and the stakes soaring. 

The script never states when the movie is set with our only clues being gas costing $1.47 the cars dating from the 1970s and 1980s and the total lack of cell phones. Even the music played in bars is generic country. At one point a birthdate on a forged ID is mentioned which may place the time in the early-1990s, but there are no cues like Nirvana t-shirts, etc. While there's something to be said for timelessness, this just distracted me.

It also takes its sweet time getting going which gave plenty of time to wonder why we're supposed to believe a hot little number like Caroline would be instantly smitten with Oliver. He's not particularly handsome and she gets on the grift tip rather quickly considering her father, Hank (Jon Gries, Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite), seems like a decent, kind man who raised his daughter alone for reasons we discover in a hair-raising scene with Kyra Sedgewick.

I'm surprised critics swooned over this "Southern Gothic crime tale" comparing it to Badlands or True Romance when it's a faint copy of those movies. Weaving is touching and beautiful, but as too often is the case, it's wasted here. Again.

Score: 5/10. Skip it.