Criminal
Don't Go! Too crooked to comprehend.
Agent's memories implanted into criminal.
Jason Bourne is coming back in July (trailer out Thursday 21 April). It’s not long, but if you simply can’t wait and are bursting to see a CIA brain experiment going awry, Criminal, from director Ariel Vromen (The Iceman) offers a dark alleyway where you can relive yourself.
Following the recent trend for London rather than NYC based films (tax breaks much?), we begin in Britain’s capital with furrowed brow CIA agent, Bill Pope (Ryan Reynolds, Deadpool). He is swiftly murdered by Spanish Anarchist terrorist Xavier Heimbahl (Jordi Mollà, Bad Boys II) leaving his mission incomplete. Problematically, as the only person who was trusted by hacker mercenary “The Dutchman” (Michael Pitt, Seven Psychopaths), no one else knows how to find him, pay him off, and stop his worm from wriggling its way into the entire US nuclear missile system under the Spaniard’s control.
Following the recent trend for London rather than NYC based films (tax breaks much?), we begin in Britain’s capital with furrowed brow CIA agent, Bill Pope (Ryan Reynolds, Deadpool). He is swiftly murdered by Spanish Anarchist terrorist Xavier Heimbahl (Jordi Mollà, Bad Boys II) leaving his mission incomplete. Problematically, as the only person who was trusted by hacker mercenary “The Dutchman” (Michael Pitt, Seven Psychopaths), no one else knows how to find him, pay him off, and stop his worm from wriggling its way into the entire US nuclear missile system under the Spaniard’s control.
Enter Pope’s boss, Quaker Wells (Gary Oldman, The Dark Knight Rises) whose first and only solution is to ask neuro-meddler Dr Franks (Tommy Lee Jones, Men in Black) to implant Pope’s memories into the brain of Jericho Stewart – a violent psychopathic death row criminal with an underdeveloped frontal lobe (Kevin Costner, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit). The procedure initially appears to be a failure, but after Jericho escapes en route back to jail and pays Pope’s wife Jill (Gal Gadot, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) an unfriendly visit, he begins to feel emotions for the first time in his life. As the implant starts to take hold, the drama begins as Bill Pope’s kind emotional history and CIA agent memory starts to influence Jericho’s murderous nature...
Although it’s an inherently ridiculous proposition, the memory transfer at the foundation of Criminal did have some potential. Sadly, however, when combined with a convoluted storyline, unconvincing characters and a wooden script, it becomes the lethal injection in the arm of a deeply confused film.
Although it’s an inherently ridiculous proposition, the memory transfer at the foundation of Criminal did have some potential. Sadly, however, when combined with a convoluted storyline, unconvincing characters and a wooden script, it becomes the lethal injection in the arm of a deeply confused film.
With a Spanish bad guy, a Dutch hacker and a crook becoming a CIA agent, Criminal is clearly an action film waiting to be fulfilled. Instead, it spends most of its 110 minutes fighting its true identity, labouring the poorly thought-out emotional aspects of Jericho’s transformation and leaving us with a chaotic psychological, sci-fi, action, espionage thriller that has little to offer in any of those categories. The illustrious cast struggles to breathe life into characters that – like Jericho’s frontal lobe – are all underdeveloped, unlikable and ambiguously motivated. Jericho in particular is a strange, strange man, with no real consistency for us to cling to or root for.
The actors’ struggle is made harder by the script. For a while, its instability sustains the film, encouraging curiosity over logic; but as it loses momentum, it yields to eye-rolling sentimentality and join-the-dots predictability. With all of the focus on Jericho’s emotional state, the mission is left so criminally undeveloped that by the end, the dialogue becomes little more than a GPS system, blandly stating what each characters is going to do next.
So don’t go. It is a shame because it is clear what Vromen is trying to achieve – a film that wants us to question the physical and emotional complexities of what makes a person bad or good. It may have worked as a TV series (take note Netflix – you heard it here first), but sadly, Criminal piles too much into one film and comes up short.
The actors’ struggle is made harder by the script. For a while, its instability sustains the film, encouraging curiosity over logic; but as it loses momentum, it yields to eye-rolling sentimentality and join-the-dots predictability. With all of the focus on Jericho’s emotional state, the mission is left so criminally undeveloped that by the end, the dialogue becomes little more than a GPS system, blandly stating what each characters is going to do next.
So don’t go. It is a shame because it is clear what Vromen is trying to achieve – a film that wants us to question the physical and emotional complexities of what makes a person bad or good. It may have worked as a TV series (take note Netflix – you heard it here first), but sadly, Criminal piles too much into one film and comes up short.
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