CRIMINAL REVIEW

Criminal is about as mediocre as they come, which is a real bummer.

Criminal has a lot of things going for it, and while the premise is interesting and the effects look good, this movie’s selling point is the cast. I’m just going to list some of the cast off, and see if you can avoid getting the same movie boner I got when I first looked it up: Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones, Scott Adkins, Gary Oldman, Ryan Reynolds, fucking SCOTT ADKINS, Gal Gadot, and Jordi Moliá. It’s a great cast. Unfortunately, they are almost entirely wasted due to paper thin characters and a fairly predictable plot.

Billy Pope (Reynolds) is a CIA operative working out of London. He has brokered a deal with The Dutchman (Michael Pitt) for the return of a program called “The Wormhole,” which controls all of the United States missile facilities. Before Pope can make the deal, he is captured and killed by an anarchist named Xavier Heimdani (Moliá). In order to find The Dutchman and recover The Wormhole, CIA officer Quaker Wells (Oldman) calls upon the services of Dr. Franks (Jones) to transfer the memories of Billy Pope into Jericho Stewart (Costner), a convict and sociopath with a rare frontal lobe disorder.

This movie has no right to be as average as it is. The only actors who get to do anything with any sort of depth is Costner and Gadot, who plays the wife of Billy Pope. Their interactions have an emotional depth to them that none of the other characters can compete with. Costner is great as Jericho, playing someone really outside of his normal image. He is both endearing and scary at the same time, and it creates an interesting dilemma in the viewer, in that the audience is being pushed to root for this guy who is essentially a monster. Costner does really good work in that realm, as we believe both the vulnerable moments and his moments of shocking disregard. Gadot is also very good as Jill Pope, who is probably the most complicated character in the film, as she must navigate both her husband’s death and the revelation that his memories and emotions are alive in someone else’s brain. These two performances carry the film.

Jones is completely wasted as an uninteresting scientist, Oldman does little but be angry and yell a lot, and the villain is completely average and predictable. The worst offense, however, is the complete waste of Scott Adkins. You get one of the best martial artists working in movies today, and you have him do nothing but run around with a gun? I don’t even think he gets to fire it at any point. Every character other than Jericho and Jill Pope are basically non-existent, and could have been played by just about any working actor, which makes the presence of these fantastic actors quite frustrating.

There isn’t a ton of action in Criminal, but the scenes that are there are all solid, comprised almost entirely of practical effects. It is refreshing to see stuff actually blow up instead of watching fake looking animated explosions, but that isn’t enough to push this film over the edge for me. The director, Ariel Vorman, clearly knows his way around an action sequence, and overall acquits himself well with Criminal, but I was still left wishing for more.

I liked Criminal. It is a refreshing, made for adults suspense film that we used to get a lot more of out of Hollywood. But it is by no means a great movie, and much of that can be attributed to weak characters and a wasted cast. Ariel Vorman is clearly a talented director with a good eye, the settings are beautiful, the action is effective, and all of that only makes me believe that this film was capable of being something really special, but simply doesn’t pull it off. Even just giving the minor characters one character driven moment might have been enough, but instead most of them stay entirely one note and are quite frankly, boring as a result. Overall, I think Criminal is perfectly O.K., and that is its greatest crime.