The Rivals of Amziah King review

This is Matthew McConaughey being very Matthew McConaughey-y for a good half of the runtime, which is either going to work for you or it isn't. It mostly worked for me.

McConaughey plays Amziah King, a beekeeper, honey producer, folk musician and charismatic little Pied Piper of his rural Oklahoma community. He has this group of people around him who work with him, play music with him, follow him around and generally seem willing to go wherever Amziah tells them to go. He's also a relatively recent evangelical Christian, and that becomes another part of the strange collection of things that make up this guy. Angelina LookingGlass plays Kateri, his former foster daughter, who comes back into his life and gradually becomes part of the honey business.

The first half of this movie is extremely folksy, and I mean that literally. There is a lot of folk music, a lot of people sitting around, and a lot of McConaughey bringing everybody together. There are funny little set pieces around the beekeeping operation, including one involving bees getting somewhere they absolutely should not be. There are oddball characters floating in and out. Kateri discovers that she seems to have the same natural affinity for the bees that Amziah does, and you spend a lot of time just watching these two reconnect and him teach her the business. I liked all of that.

Then something happens and the movie basically becomes a different movie. Suddenly we're in a revenge story. Then we're flirting with a gangster movie. The tone changes considerably, and the friends I saw it with thought the second half was where the thing really picked up.

I don't know that I agree completely because I liked the first half for what it was, but the second half certainly has more plot. The problem for me is where the movie ultimately goes with some of its characters and the decisions they make.

I'm not going to spoil that because a lot of the fun here is not knowing exactly what kind of movie you're watching until it turns into that movie. But there are choices toward the end that I don't think work, either morally or in terms of the characters the movie has spent all this time building. I could understand what the writers wanted me to accept. I'm just not sure they earned it, and that's frustrating because I think they had a chance to make something really good here. Not great, but really good.

Instead, I think it lands a little flat because the movie's own sensibilities get in its way. Still, I enjoyed it. McConaughey carries the first half on pure McConaughey energy. If you can take two hours of folk music, beekeeping and Matthew McConaughey being Matthew McConaughey, you're probably going to have a pretty good time. If that sentence sounds exhausting to you, then the first hour may feel like it's 14 hours long.

The second half is going to depend much more on whether you get attached to these people and whether you can ride with the choices they make once things get ugly. I could not entirely. But this is fun. It's interesting. It's different. I'm going to tell you to see it. I'm not going to tell you it's great. It's pretty good.