"Carolina Caroline:" Another Tired Bonnie and Clyde Fable

To anyone who doubts the longevity of Arthur Penn’s era defining Bonnie and Clyde, look no further than Adam Rehmeier’s 2025 film Carolina Caroline. I wouldn’t say that the New Hollywood giant looms over Carolina Caroline as much as it lurks beneath, giving the film its very foundation. Obviously the influence of Bonnie and Clyde’s doomed criminal spree can be found in any crime film released in the past 60 years, but in Carolina Caroline it seems like the DNA of Beatty and Dunaway’s duo was spliced in a lab into two carbon copies. 

The comparisons to Bonnie and Clyde were inevitable from the jump, however that isn’t necessarily a death sentence. I was rather drawn to the film for that very reason. If Bonnie and Clyde changed Hollywood with its transgressive and excessive displays of sex and violence, how would a contemporary film navigate that same story in a world where sex and violence are so accepted into the mainstream? Carolina Caroline takes some interesting risks with this premise, but ultimately, the film ends up updating a classic form with nothing more than thin polish and tired cliches.

Carolina Caroline seems foremost concerned with excess. The soundtrack hardly rests, the montages are endless, and the costumes are skimpy. Rehmeier seems to relish in the endless aesthetics that he pulls from pop culture, employing every opportunity to encase the film in markers of our time. Intentionally or not, this aspect of the film that dominates the first half is an accurate depiction of this moment in media, not necessarily as a champion of the counterculture, but of the mainstream. These are the outfits, the ideologies, and the songs that are taking the youth by storm. It can be grating or intoxicating, but its presence makes the film a fascinating piece of the 2020s zeitgeist.

This is what happens when Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are hailed as heroes before the movie starts, decades before it starts in fact. The way of the outlaws is now the dominant attitude, the one that garners millions of views on TikTok and sells out arenas. Whether that renders the transgressive nature of their crimes defunct depends on your relationship to pop culture, I can’t help but be intrigued into what exactly this music video presentation of the narrative has to say about this moment in time.

While the film begins as a promising pseudo-satire of the decade, like a Southern-fried version of Spring Breakers, the film slowly starts to lose its edge and shape into a disappointingly cliched story. In the cat and mouse game between the encroaching law and lovers on the run, Caroline and Oliver, the story forfeits style for plot. It begins to rush through narrative beats, reaching climaxes through what feels like happenstance. The hollow characters that shine as the plastered faces of the escapist country song dream world are suddenly placed in the centre of an intense character-driven thriller. As though the film suddenly forces itself to grow up, an onslaught of “cinematic moments” interrupt an otherwise interesting pop culture jumble.

Luckily, the fiery and fun performances from Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner remain consistent. Despite clunky dialogue exchanges, Weaving and Gallner maintain a sense of freewheeling and sexy fun in their relationship. It’s a shallow pool for them to wade through, but they certainly make the most of it. Their performances would have benefitted from a clearer direction as the tonal whiplash creates quite a drag, but for what they’ve been given, Weaving and Gallner are a fun duo to watch.

However, the film’s biggest holdback is just how concerned it is with its own mythology. It believes its painting a portrait of rugged outsiders, when in fact, that couldn’t be further from the truth. While it’s spiked with danger and sex, it derives all of its danger and sex from the roaring current of mainstream culture. There’s nothing at risk as two good-looking people espouse common ideologies and listen to the Billboard hot 100. They are not out of place nor out of time, they fit squarely within the moment and any imminent threat to their freedom hardly feels pertinent. Occasionally, Carolina Caroline latches on to some great truths buried in the noise of pop culture, but it’s more interested in telling us a story we’ve already seen. Bonnie and Clyde sent seismic waves through cinema and Carolina Caroline feels like a feeble ripple that quickly dissipates upon the shore. As a hyper stylized gen-Z fashion statement, it’s a rousing success, bound to populate pinterest boards and aesthetic clothing brands for a long time, but as a gripping narrative, there’s still some work to be done.