Matthew MacConaughey plays Amziah King, a beekeeper in a small Oklahoma backwoods community. He’s no hobbyist. Honey-making is big business around these parts and Amziah runs a biggish operation with a warehouse full of tanks and barrels and a big fast-spinning machine for separating the honey from the comb. We know he’s a rough diamond with a heart of gold because when a potential employee puts his head inside the machine and it rips his scalp off, Amziah retrieves it, visits him in hospital and generally does right by him.
Amziah plays mandolin and sings in a band with his mates, who are as rough-hewn and fetchingly unkempt as he is, with their long hair, tats and scruffy workaday clothing. We suspect they are as full of folksy downhome wisdom as he is too, but we don’t really know because he’s the only one who gets to say anything most of the time. He’s bossy but lovable. He orders his mates and his neighbours to come and sing and play whenever it suits him, and they don’t seem to mind. In fact one female singer keeps a huge beaming smile on her face to an extent that made me suspect she was cast by virtue of being in the band credited with composing the music his band plays. Of that more later.
Amziah is something of a bee-whisperer. When the local school is invaded by a swarm of bees, who ya gonna call? Amziah and his team, of course, which now includes the young Native American girl he and his late wife fostered when she was a child and who’s just reappeared in his life. He teaches her all his bee-wisdom, and plenty of time is allotted to showing Matthew Maconaughey fearlessly allowing bees to settle all over his face and arms, and then flicking them off with a single shrug. Needless to say, the school bee crisis is soon resolved.
Bad things start to happen. There’s a local Big Man who’s greedy and powerful and doesn’t care about the welfare of this lovable community, let alone the bees which as far as he’s concerned are there to make money. There’s a tragic death. Amziah’s hives are stolen and his troops rally to retrieve them.
This plot turn comes as a bit of a relief from the overlong establishment of Amziah as a good bloke who inspires infinite loyalty and embodies all the old-fashioned virtues. I was beginning to tire of the fixed beaming smile on the face of the singing neighbour lady.
There is danger, there is tragedy, but the countryfolk are resourceful and clever and work with admirable team spirit. The story gets moving and becomes more suspenseful with lots of lively practical detail but….. it could have been so much better. For instance, there’s one sequence where Amziah’s team set out to fetch the hives back from across a fast-flowing river. We see them fording the river with a stout guide rope, and on a signal the accomplice upstream tips empty barrels off the bridge to float downstream and be trapped against the rope, from where they can be recovered and dragged ashore to be lashed together underneath a timber raft, the makings of which they have brought with them. Make that three rafts. They then carry the hives – about 60 by the looks – and load them onto the rafts. They then chop the rope so the rafts float free. Hooray – operation accomplished! But, leaving aside the question how one young man and one slip of a girl could have got this much arduous physical work done in just a few hours, including an extended smoko during which they exchange life stories, there’s the continuity problem that the rafts continue to float downstream, not upstream to where the bloke is waiting with his truck! It kind of doesn’t matter because we don’t see them retrieving the rafts and barrels from the water, but that must have taken a few hours too! But no, it’s a straight cut back to Amziah’s warehouse where they run inside with the hives to extract and bottle the honey. Why run? What’s the hurry? There’s no explanation.
The Rivals of Amziah King has been described as a neo-western crime thriller and revenge drama with bluegrass. I’d add ‘heartwarmer’. As to the bluegrass – I wish. Amziah plays the mandolin and there are fiddles and banjos aplenty, but there’s nothing of authentic Americana about his band’s music. It’s bland and generic. The accompanying soundtrack does have some nice harmonic singing which might be based on native American melodies, and a decent version of ‘Greenback Dollar’ plays over an action scene towards the end. I’m a great fan of trad Americana and bluegrass, and I briefly suspected the band’s music was composed by AI. It wasn’t: I looked it up and it’s by various musicians described as indie-folk or folk-rock. I was surprised to read that T Bone Burnett was one of the soundtrack producers. Surprised and disappointed he didn’t do a better job!
Another problem: I missed a lot of the dialogue. The characters all speak a thick Oklahoma accent but it wasn’t just that. The film suffers from that modern blight where clarity of speech is sacrificed to the aesthetic of naturalism. Speech is gabbled and people talk over one another. And it wasn’t just me. My companion to the left put down her lack of comprehension to the accents and the bloke behind me kept asking his wife ‘what did he say?’ My eavesdropping picked up the odd clue, but even she wasn’t able to decipher every fuzzy utterance.
There’s one character who’s depicted as having such a strong accent that no one can understand him, not even the locals. This joke could have worked well except he comes back into play later in the story to convey crucial information and this time he speaks clearly enough to be understood. Another irritating inconsistency, of which there are many.
Why does the young ex-marine take off his shirt when approaching the bees? Is it just to show off his buff torso?
And why does the baddie (Kurt Russell) run away from the goodies at the end? OK, he deserves a comeuppance but he’s innocent of what they’re chasing him for!
Angelina LookingGlass is the indigenous actress who plays Amziah’s foster daughter. She’s lovely, but they overdo the Noble Savage bit. Too much gazing enigmatically into the middle distance.
The other characters are suitably diverse and quirky, but they are mostly just wallpaper to MacConaughey’s egotistical turn.
The Rivals of Amziah King has an interesting cultural and landscape setting, but it’s full of plot-holes, and the sometimes nasty violence doesn’t sit well with its mission to be quirky and heartwarming.