Ryan Reynolds doesn’t get top billing in “Criminal.” Playing a CIA agent whose death precipitates the action of the film – a thriller in which the dead agent’s memories are implanted into the head of a psychopathic killer (Kevin Costner) – the actor ducks out of the story early, with almost the trace of a smile on his battered, bloody face.
Could it be that he’s hoping that the still-fresh memory of his hit movie “Deadpool” won’t be tainted by the stench of this latest stinker? Or that he still feels some shame about last summer’s “Self/less,” his previous, widely panned foray into the brain-swap genre?
The actor needn’t worry. “Criminal” is so forgettable that you may find yourself straining, as you walk to your car afterwards, even to recall who was in it.
As the antihero Jericho, a man struggling to reconcile the “scrambled eggs” of his memories and moralities, Costner makes a somewhat deeper impression. At least he seems to be having fun with his character’s homicidal tendencies. (Jericho is said to suffer from an undeveloped frontal lobe, which predisposes him for a personality transplant. Right.) Once those violent traits subside and are overridden by the dead agent’s warm-and-fuzzy nature, Jericho settles into the kind of paternal groove the actor has fallen into, all too often, of late.
Sure, sure, Jericho gets to show his softer side when he tracks down the agent’s grieving widow (Gal Gadot) and young daughter (Lara Decaro) and starts bonding with them – after he has killed several innocent people along the way, mind you – but that’s boring. Not to mention hard to swallow. Suddenly, we’re supposed to care about this loose cannon, just because he’s shown playing with a little girl? The film’s careless disregard for plausible emotion is unforgivable.
As the histrionic CIA station chief who engineered the mind-meld in hopes of accessing the location of $10 million that the dead agent has squirreled away – and apprehending a hacker (Michael Pitt) who is blackmailing the government with stolen military software – Gary Oldman seems resentful that Costner’s face is bigger than his on the movie poster. You can almost hear Oldman screaming, somewhere off camera, even when it’s not his scene.
Oh, is there a plot here?
Actually, yes. And there’s a kernel of an interesting idea inside of it. The screenplay by Douglas Cook and David Weisberg (“Double Jeopardy”) is based on parallel themes: the battle between two warring consciousnesses over Jericho’s brain, and the battle between the CIA and Pitt’s hacker over a piece of computer programming called Vigilant Shield. (There’s actually a third person who wants it, played by Jordi Mollà, but never mind him. His presence just needlessly complicates things.)
The thing is, we never get the idea that the writers, let alone director Ariel Vroman (“The Iceman”), are aware of this narrative synergy, or that they know what to do with it. Like its brain-damaged protagonist, “Criminal” just shouts and shoots its way into, not out of, an oblivion of illogic, plot holes and emotionally unengaging scenery-chewing. Rated R.
