America Fantastica

It would make a heck of a movie with its murderers' row of juicy characters that could happily chew the scenery for its duration. In the midst of a mythomania epidemic, one Boyd Halverson decides to rob a bank. From there it's a mopey road trip across the continent with his willing hostage Angie Bing, a Pentecostal motormouthed former bank teller who is at once ardently enamoured with Boyd while leaving hints for her unhinged, narcissistic fiancé Randy Zapf. There's the husband and wife owners of the bank, hesitant to report the robbery lest it reveal how much they've been stealing from it all along. The CFO in name only, goon to Boyd's ex-wife's husband, sent to find and grievously hurt Boyd. A couple ex-cons, a possibly schizophrenic Finnish lap-dancer, a corrupt cop, an upstanding dispatcher and her best friend all converging on that same Boyd Halverson and the $81,000 he managed to run off with.

I just couldn't see the point of it all - other than to illustrate the absolute shit-show, lying-ass, oblivious monkey show that seems to be Trump-era America. It's not quite incisive enough to hold as a book but could make for an appropriately over the top lampoon on screen. Neither the tragic motivation or the intriguing idea of a cross-species contagious lying epidemic deliver on their initial promise to really shore up the rest of the shenanigans on display here. It would have been better off to just really lean into the absurdity.