Review: Arnie & Barney are the lovable idiot stars of a silly, breezy adventure

There is a special joy in a watching a movie about dumb characters fumbling their way through their journeys. Something like Dumb and Dumber or The Man Who Knew Too Little. It's fun to laugh at their idiocy, and satisfying to watch them triumph anyways. Sometimes, stupidity is a superpower. That's certainly the case in Arnie & Barney, which hits theaters in the UK next week.

This is a spin-off of the Maya the Bee franchise, which started life as a children's book in 1912, had an anime series adaptation in the 1970s, and has more recently gained new life through a CGI series that has also spun off into a few features. I've heard of the series before, but Arnie & Barney is my proper introduction, and man, what a great way to fumble my way in. No prior knowledge is needed to jump in here, though fans of Maya will be happy to see her make a few appearances throughout.

The titular pair are a couple of ants in a platoon who are trying to track down water in the midst of a drought. The meadow where they live looks more like a desert these days: just sand and rocks as far as the eye can see (with the occasional but of litter tossed in for good measure). While most of the squad is made of diligent soldiers, Arnie and Barney are a bit looser in their duties. They like spending their time reading comic books, imagining themselves taking part in grand adventures, and performing skits based on said imagined adventures for their comrades. Sometimes with disastrous results. 

Due to their latest mess-up, the duo is left behind to dig a hole while the rest of the squad sets out on more important business. This proves to be a stroke of luck, as Hypnita the mosquito uses her hypnotizing sunglasses to brainwash and enslave the other ants into joining her scheme. She's working with the notorious villain Legs (a centipede, naturally) to horde all the water so they can then bottle and sell it to the other bugs, who would normally be able to get it for free. It's sort of Chinatown by way of A Bug's Life? Maybe? 

Whatever it is, it's very fun.

Arnie and Barney are, at every turn in this movie, just total idiots. I thought maybe one of them would be the relative brains of the operation, but no, there are no brains to be found here. They are both so dumb. Literally the picture of that famous tweet "its always 2 dumb bitches telling eachother 'exactlyyyy'". That is them to a T. I love the energy they bring, the occasional fourth-wall breaks, the meta comedy, the constant mistakes. At one point, they're making a grappling hook, and when they throw it, the hook flies right off of the rope. The following exchange then happens:

"Why didn't you tie the rope to it?"
"It wasn't part of the montage."

That's comedic gold! The whole movie is full of great jokes like this. It's breezy and funny, never taking itself too seriously, and always willing to go for the one-liner. Does every single one land? No, but the batting average is pretty impressive.

The story is very much what you expect, with a couple little twists here and there. One of the best wrinkles is that Arnie and Barney are seeking out the hero of their favorite comic book, a secret agent mosquito named Szzkeat. Everyone else is like...that is a fictional character. But they end up finding her, kind of. She's actually a cartoonist who fashioned herself into a comic book hero to show that mosquitos can be heroes, too. In the world of bugs, everyone looks down on mosquitos as being gross, untrustworthy blood-suckers (even Legs thinks so, and he's downright evil!). So there's a nice little bit of "don't just a book by its cover" theming, which always goes down fine.

Arnie & Barney isn't going to set the world on fire. It's a super simple movie, but one that really succeeds in its mission. This is a movie that wants to provide some easy, often dumb, laughs, and it does it. When the two of them started rapping mid-movie (because of course they do), I didn't roll my eyes. I reached for my phone so I could Shazam the song. This is a mini laugh riot of a movie, and one that will hopefully make its way to the States down the road.