‘The Rivals of Amziah King’ Review: Oklahoma’s Sweetest, Strangest Crime Saga Gets Away With Almost Everything

Matthew McConaughey has been gone from movie screens for six years, and the role that brought him back is not the one anyone would have guessed. He plays Amziah King, a bluegrass playing, honey producing patriarch of a ragtag Oklahoma community, and from his first scene ordering chicken fried steak with a banjo slung over his shoulder, it is obvious McConaughey is having the time of his life.

‘The Rivals of Amziah King’ arrives as the sophomore feature from writer director Andrew Patterson, whose debut earned him a reputation as a filmmaker willing to bend genre until it nearly snaps. This one bends five genres at once, folding a heist thriller, a revenge western, a coming of age drama, and a full blown musical into a single story about stolen barrels of honey and the estranged foster daughter who reenters Amziah’s life at the worst possible moment.

What struck me first is how unwilling this movie is to sit still. One scene is a communal singalong scored with genuine warmth, the next is a man losing a chunk of his scalp in an industrial accident, and somehow both feel like they belong to the same fictional Oklahoma. That whiplash is the whole point, and for the first hour it works because Amziah himself is a magnetic enough presence to hold the tonal chaos together.

Then the film does something genuinely bold. Around the midpoint, Amziah essentially exits his own story and hands the reins to Kateri, the foster daughter played by newcomer Angelina LookingGlass in her first ever screen role. Her half of the movie slows down, turns colder and more calculating, and asks the audience to trust an unknown actress carrying scenes that used to belong to a movie star. LookingGlass acquits herself well enough, though her quieter register can’t always fill the space McConaughey vacates, and there are stretches where she registers more as a symbol of resilience than a fully drawn person.

The film’s biggest liability is structural. Patterson stuffs so much plot and so many competing moods into two hours that some threads get sacrificed, and the back half occasionally feels like it is trying to resolve mysteries the front half never properly set up. The musical interludes, gorgeous as they are, sometimes function less like storytelling and more like tourism board footage for rural Oklahoma, even though a fair amount of it was actually shot elsewhere.

And yet none of that stopped me from being charmed. Kurt Russell shows up as a silky, dangerous local power broker who steals every scene he’s dropped into, and the film’s willingness to let its violence turn suddenly ugly gives the whole thing real stakes instead of quaint small town cosplay. There is a lived in specificity to the way this community talks, argues, and grieves together that feels earned rather than manufactured, and that specificity papers over a lot of the narrative seams.

‘The Rivals of Amziah King’ is the rare movie that gets away with its own excess because the excess comes from genuine ambition rather than carelessness. It stumbles in its back half and asks a first time actress to carry weight she isn’t always ready for, but it never once feels safe or predictable, and that counts for a great deal in a marketplace full of movies too scared to swing this hard.

I walked out thinking about the music, the bees, and McConaughey’s grin days later, and that kind of staying power is not something I take lightly. This is a flawed, occasionally overstuffed film that I still can’t stop recommending, and I’m landing on 8.5 out of 10.

Did ‘The Rivals of Amziah King’ win you over too, or did the tonal shifts lose you along the way? Drop your take in the comments.