Film Review: Criminal (2016)

~ beetleypete

Sitting at home feeling like death warmed up makes you do things you might not usually consider doing.

Like watching a film you might never have thought twice about any other time.

Check the cast! Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman, Tommy Lee Jones, Ryan Reynolds, Michael Pitt, and many more! This must be bloody good, right?

Hmm. Oldman shouts and runs around a lot. He has his usual not-quite convincing American accent, and plays a very angry CIA chief. Tommy Lee Jones is wasted as a scientist who has invented some kind of incredible memory-swap procedure, and doesn’t seem to believe in it himself. Ryan Reynolds has a small part as the film opens, then spends the rest of it as an occasional ‘memory flashback’. Michael Pitt, usually excellent, plays a scaredy-cat computer hacker who seems to be frightened of his own shadow for most of the film. Then we have the ‘villain’, a man who wants to use the world’s nuclear stockpile to destroy all governments.

Shall I just turn it off now? What about Costner though?

Cast against type, Kevin plays Jerico, the Criminal of the title. A man who was born without emotion, and has spent most of his life in prison, after committing many crimes because of his lack of remorse and empathy. He looks really tough, and acts it too.

So this is the idea. Reynolds character is an agent, killed at the start of the film as he tries to intervene between the hacker and the arch-villain. His body is kept alive so that Tommy’s scientist can be brought in to retrieve his memeory, using his untried invention. They need someone with a ‘blank-brain’, devoid of emotion, so they bring the unfortunate Jerico to England from prison, and do the mind-swap. But he doesn’t play ball. He escapes, and goes on the run, with the flashbacks of the agent’s memory leading him to find the man’s wife and child, and eventually to track down the hacker and the super-villain.

Meanwhile, the CIA are trying to find him, and so are the minions of the villain. In the mayhem, a lot of people get injured and killed, on the way to the ‘big finish’.

That’s about it. It tries to be a little bit of a lot of things, and doesn’t succeed. It is a bit ‘Jason Bourne’, but not tech enough. It feels like a film that might have starred Bruce Willis or Arnie, if the story had been better. There is a lot of driving around, a lot of running from Oldman, helicopter surveillance, car crashes, police chases, and plenty of shootings. Meanwhile, Jerico has to adjust to discovering what it is like to feel love and emotion for the dead agent’s family, whilst retaining his evil former self for long enough to get the job done.

Costner is pretty good, I have to say. I liked the locations in London and the surrounding counties, but I can’t really recommend it, unless you have the flu, it’s raining outside, and there is nothing else worth watching on TV.

Or if you really like Kevin Costner.

30 thoughts on “Film Review: Criminal (2016)”

  8. I might have seen it advertised recently in the listings, and passed over it, but in preference for what, I can’t remember. I think the latter 2 of your 3 prerequisites for watching the film can be guaranteed some time in the future, but I’ll try very hard to avoid the first one, if at all possible 😉 Cheers, Jon.

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  14. I’ve seen this film years back, and can’t really remember much about it. That’s usually a bad sign. I do remember parts of it, and that Costner (as usual) wasn’t bad in it. But other than that this was one of those dime a dozen movies, that you tend to forget about a week later😊

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