I Don't Care How Awesome Her Rainbow Shades Are! Stay Away from Arizona!

There is undoubtedly a very good dark comedy that can be made about the recent subprime mortgage crisis but the 2018 movie Arizona is not it.

The movie started off very promisingly by introducing us to divorced single mom and real estate agent Cassie Fowler (played by Rosemarie DeWitt) whose attempt to sell a house was interrupted by a tragic incident. But then after the first ten minutes and a brief rendition of an old Mark Lindsay song that played over the opening credits, we were introduced to Sonny, an angry client (played by Danny McBride) who kidnapped Ms. Fowler to keep her from reporting his murder of Ms. Fowler's boss. A little Sonny went a long way yet Danny McBride was an executive producer so we the audience ended up getting a whole lot of Sonny. A lot more than this particular audience member cared for.

Anyway, once Sonny kidnapped Ms. Fowler, the whole movie turned into a wacky hostage movie in which we the audience were supposed to root for Ms. Fowler to get away while at the same time putting up with Sonny's bad jokes. If you had ever seen the 1987 thriller The Stepfather, you could probably predict most of the events of the last half of the movie in which one possible source of rescue after another was eliminated until Ms. Fowler had no choice left except to become a final girl. She even started to lose bits of her clothing as if she were auditioning for a Reagan-era slasher movie. Fortunately, she managed to escape without finding herself in a state of total nudity -- which was a good thing because as much as I liked Ms. DeWitt's performance, I could not help wishing her character had had a less misogynistic story arc. On the plus side, though, it didn't seem likely that the bad guy will return for a sequel. So thank Heaven for that!