Kevin Costner may be one of the last all-American cinematic heroes of a certain era. But, that doesn’t mean he is a stranger to playing characters who live on the darker side of the human condition. In his latest, Criminal, he may have a soul in Jericho who makes his characters in Mr. Brooks, A Perfect World and even 3,000 Miles to Graceland seem like lovable puppies.
Costner is Jericho and as we meet him, he’s a death row inmate who appears to be the perfect candidate for an experimental procedure that puts an individual’s memories in another’s head. In this case, it is Bill Pope (Ryan Reynolds), a secret agent who holds the key to an international hacker coming in from the cold to help the U.S. Gary Oldman’s Quaker Wells, a CIA operative working in London, will stop at nothing to ensure that this procedure perfected by Dr. Franks (Tommy Lee Jones) works. After all, national security is on the line.
Once Jericho is injected with Pope’s memories, everyone waits to see what the newly altered psychopath will say, and most importantly, remember. The thing is… Costner’s character is still quite childish and Wells looses patience with him quite quickly and orders him to be destroyed. That doesn’t go so well and now they have a psycho killer with emerging memories of a highly trained CIA operative loose in London with state secrets stuck in his brain. The potential danger for everyone is everywhere.
Israeli director Ariel Vromen has his hands full with Criminal. This is a high concept picture, wrapped in a popcorn movie’s clothing. In order to make it work, Vromen needs a well thought out script. Unfortunately, he does not get one from writers Douglas Cook and David Weisberg. It’s not even that the story drifts into clichés that we’ve seen a thousand times. The issues are more pragmatic than that. There are a lot of balls in the air here and they don’t all seem to find a satisfactory trajectory to the ground.
There is also the issue that many of the characters are not even remotely flushed out. Gal Gadot (fresh from her scene-stealing turn in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) is completely underused as Pope’s widow and mother of his children. One of the best scenes in the film is one where Jericho and Gadot’s Jill Pope have an (albeit scary) conversation where the latter sees signs of her late husband in Jericho. The audience needs more of that and a little less of the science fiction that feels a little too far fetched. And that is crazy, because in actuality, the science shown in Criminal is probably a few decades away. Somehow, those behind Criminal make their science fiction seem like more science impossibility.
What makes this film watchable and takes it away from the realm of being one of the worst films we’ve seen in the last several years is Costner.
He is transformative as Jericho and it is easy to see parts of Reynolds’ characterization come through him as the film progresses. Costner also does something that is quite difficult. Jericho is a monster. There is no two ways about it. Yet, we pull for him. We feel for him. When he has a headache after going through the procedure that inserted Pope’s memories in his head, he is begging Dr. Franks for something for the pain. The audience collectively wants to shout, “Give the man a damn aspirin.” Not an easy task, given that the person in pain is a psycho killer. Then, watching him become more humanized as the persona of Pope infiltrates his memory is a tricky task for any actor, but Costner does it with intense believability that raises the bar for this entire movie. The actor has done quite a series of movies of late that have been entirely entertaining. We just hope that Criminal shows that he can push the boundaries as an actor and that the takeaway is not that he is on a track of making stinkers.
Grade: D