Cast stellar, but logic missing in lackluster ‘Criminal’
Published 7:17 pm Wednesday, April 13, 2016
By Robert Horton
Herald movie critic
“Criminal” is the kind of movie in which characters have names like Jerico Stewart and Quaker Wells — big comic-book names meant to impress us with their cleverness.
The story that surrounds them is as implausible as their monikers: A dying secret agent’s memory is transplanted into the brain of a hardened criminal, who is then expected to summon up the lost memories and lead the authorities to a big bag of money and some dangerous nuclear codes.
Far-fetched as it is, I don’t have a problem with the plot. Brain-switching and nukes? Bring it on. That’s not what makes “Criminal” a bad movie.
What makes it bad is the flabbiness of the execution, the absence of storytelling logic, and the spectacle of gifted actors struggling to get something — anything — going. To the movie’s credit, it simply launches into the central premise without wasting time explaining much.
The body of the secret agent (Ryan Reynolds, around for an opening chase scene) is being kept alive by the CIA, so that soft-spoken Dr. Franks — I assume the nod to Frankenstein mythology is intended — can extract the memories. Tommy Lee Jones plays the doctor with such pained super-sensitivity, you have to assume he thought he was in a more interesting film.
The recipient of the dead man’s brain waves is Jerico (Kevin Costner), a monstrous psychopath. In one of the script’s better bits of pulp craziness, we are told that Jerico is a fitting subject for the memory transplant because a childhood head injury rendered his frontal lobes undeveloped and thus fertile ground for a sudden injection of personality.
The film doesn’t mention whether Jerico ever consented to this experiment, a touch of creepiness consistent with its portrayal of the CIA as psychotic vigilantes. A potentially intriguing stroke is that Jerico doesn’t just inherit access to the vital information in the case; he also takes on the emotional life of the dead man, including a wife (Gal Gadot, whose Wonder Woman was the best thing about “Batman v Superman”) and child.
But he’ll only have access to the new brain-stuff for a while. Then he’ll revert back to being the super-violent Jerico.
Thanks to his super skills, Jerico gets loose, and he leaves behind a path of extreme violence. Many of his antics encourage audience laughter — Costner’s casual smugness adds to this — which is one of the ways director Ariel Vroman (“The Iceman”) allows the tone to waver.
Jerico takes what he wants without apologies, and what’s a little collateral damage along the way? There’s some head-crunching at the expense of a French speaker that might’ve been written back in the “Freedom Fries” days.
Meanwhile, the movie sidelines talented people like Michael Pitt and Alice Eve, while the super-baddie duties to go Jordi Molla (late of “Riddick”), playing a “Spanish anarchist”; as befits a villain of our times, he is mostly seen at his laptop. (Oh, for the old movie days of international criminal geniuses, when laps were reserved for Siamese cats.)
And then there’s Gary Oldman, as a CIA honcho. As soon as you hear Oldman’s New York accent, you know this is going to be a tough slog, the kind of bad performance only a great actor can give.
Not only does his character honk and bellow and generally badger Jerico in ways that seem guaranteed to make the experiment fail, he also gives up after five minutes. And you wonder why U.S. intelligence lags.
I guess “Criminal” is setting up the potential for Costner to enter the Liam Neeson bone-cracking phase of his career. Maybe that will happen. But this thing makes “Taken” look awfully good by comparison.
Anybody writing an action movie should be forced to look at each scene and ask why the characters are doing what they do. If the answer is to move the plot from Point A to Point B, you haven’t worked hard enough.
“Criminal” does this repeatedly (oh yes, by all means let’s put Jerico in the back of a CIA car again, even though the last time we did that he escaped and killed both agents), and that kind of lazy storycraft is a much bigger problem than the mundane business of transplanting brains.
“Criminal” 1 ½ stars
A psychopath (Kevin Costner) receives the memories of a dead CIA agent, in the hopes of finding out the dead man’s secrets. This far-fetched action flick suffers from a fatal lack of logical behavior, stranding a very good cast with lazy material: Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman, and Gal Gadot are included.
Rating: R, for violence, language
Showing: Cinebarre, Everett, Monroe, Marysville, Meridian
