CRIMINAL is a very silly movie, and I’m fairly certain most of the people involved in making this film know it’s silly. “Silly” is not inherently bad, but too much of it can be severely detrimental to the well being of a film and its audience. CRIMINAL takes the approach that if you throw every crazy idea on the screen, some of it might turn out interesting, and we know how well that always works out. There’s (junk) science fiction, action, a love story, political intrigue, hackers, and three cast members from JFK and two other actors who are in superhero movies that are out right now. So if you can’t find something to latch onto in this swirling mess of a movie, then maybe you’re the one with the problem. Think about it!
The film opens will CIA agent Bill Pope (Ryan Reynolds) who is attempting to stash a master hacker nicknamed The Dutchman (Michael Pitt) from the bad guys. He suspects that he might be in danger, so he attempts to let his superiors know where The Dutchman is hidden, but before that happens, he’s killed. In order to extract this knowledge from Pope’s brain, the local CIA chief Quaker Wells (Gary Oldman) enlists the help of a doctor (Tommy Lee Jones) who has been working on experiments involving moving memories from one brain to another. He’s never done human trials, but he’s aware of a dangerous, sociopathic criminal named Jericho Stewart (Kevin Costner) who has a type of brain damage that makes him a prime candidate for this procedure, and within hours he’s receiving memories from Pope. I don’t make this shit up, folks, I just report it.
At first it does seem to work, but after Jericho escapes his CIA handlers, he starts having flashes of Pope’s memories, which begin as a jumbled mess but start to come into focus the longer he has them in his head. The problem is, the memories will likely fade after a couple of days, but instead of helping the CIA, Jericho seems more drawn to Pope’s family—wife Jill (Gal Gadot) and young daughter Emma (Lara Decaro)—although he’s not sure why at first, which leads to a couple of really awkward scenes between Jericho and the Pope family after he breaks into their home, but doesn’t bother to explain why.
Both the CIA and the criminal organization that killed Pope are after Jericho for what he knows about The Dutchman, and CRIMINAL becomes one of those ridiculous games of waiting for the right memories to surface just when they’re most needed to move the plot forward. Director Ariel Vromen (THE ICEMAN) and writers Douglas Cook and David Weisberg throw caution to the wind and opt to let their movie just roll along like a runaway train with cut brakes, only capable of ending when it completely derails and kills dozens in the process.
Spanish-born actor Jordi Mollà plays Hagbardaka Heimbahl, one of the single most generic villains I’ve seen in quite some time. He seems to be a better hacker than The Dutchman, he knows the CIA’s moves at all times, and he’s just vaguely foreign looking enough that he might be that threatening kind of European or perhaps Middle Easterner. Does it matter, really?
There’s a moment in the film where Costner’s Jericho gets so frustrated with both the situation around him and the chaos inside his head that he just lets out a primal scream that sounds like a animal howling more than a man. It’s meant to convey how mixed up this bad man is with a good man’s thoughts in his head, but the audience I saw it with laughed quite a bit (me included).
CRIMINAL is a noble disaster with a raspy Costner trying to convince us he’s the worst bad guy on the planet…until he’s trying to convince us he’s got a nice guy inside him. Admittedly, Costner was a good choice for a role like this, but with writing so limp and loaded with familiar character types, he doesn’t stand a chance. Some may make a case that this disaster is pure anarchic genius; I’d love to read that argument, but there’s no way I’d be convinced. And now in my head, CRIMINAL has made that shift from “silly” to “dumb.”
