The performances are a couple of drawers down from the top in this Nouveau Bonnie and Clyde romp; it features Bella Thorne – from the recent teen-abstinence weepie Midnight Sun – in glassy-eyed Insta princess mode. She’s playing Arielle, a bored pouty badass in Florida, longing to get away from all the local losers and find fame and fortune.
Arielle hooks up with smouldering hottie Dean (Jake Manley) who’s out on parole for armed robbery and together they take off across country on a crime spree, holding up gas stations – escapades that Arielle videos and posts online: she is electrified to see how she and Dean are blowing up on social media.
But wait. Surely that makes them traceable? Well, no, the script perfunctorily says that Arielle has put in place an “IP blocker”. Erm … would this kind of expertise be available to the non-nerd community? I’m not sure.
Finally, our two desperadoes come across a young African-American woman, Elle (Amber Riley), who appears to be part of the online fanbase. It is her job to assure us, the audience, that we should be rooting for Arielle and Dean because they have radical outlaw glamour, giving a voice to the downtrodden and dispossessed.
There are one or two gonzo shootouts that, admittedly, go with a swing, but this isn’t great. It’s never easy to represent online existence in a feature film and this is another movie that has fallen short. Some serviceable action sequences, though.