Review of Criminal (2016) by Christopher B — 26 Jul 2016

I think this movie has an interesting concept. I'm not lying about that, it's not like this had the most interesting concept I've ever seen, but it's pretty intriguing. Transplanting a CIA agent's memory onto someone else in order to help stop this hacker from selling secrets that would put the entire U.

S in danger. But, if I'm being completely honest, this is one of the most boring films I have seen in a long time. I've certainly seen worse movies. Like, for example, London has Fallen was a worse movie than this, but that movie had so much action that it was almost hard to be bored by it.

I'm not even saying the film was bad in the conventional sense. Well, really, the narrative is really poorly written and somewhat convoluted, but action films have had convoluted stories for the longest time, The Matrix anybody, but that hasn't kept a lot of them from being entertaining as fuck.

While there are some shootouts and fight scenes here, this doesn't really even qualify as an action movie. Once Bill Pope's thoughts are transplanted to Jerico, the movie really does take fucking forever until they actually do anything with them.

Jerico just goes around by a prick to everybody, all the while he starts getting flashbacks to Bill's memories and it just felt like they were artificially extending the length of the film. I swear, it's probably an hour into the film before it feels like they actually move the story forward.

I literally cannot remember much of everything that happened after Jerico has Bill's memories given to him. I watched this movie less than a day ago and already I can't remember much of anything.

Though, to be fair, I have seen films that I've forgotten in a shorter time than this one. Once they do get the story going, the film does show signs of improvement, but it's not really much, cause it's still kind of boring.

I do like the idea of Bill's memories influencing this man, who cannot feel empathy and does what he wants, to change 'his ways', as it were. It's not great, but at least it gives the character of Jerico an arc.

And Kevin Costner is quite good in this movie as it is, so he makes the character somewhat enjoyable to watch even if the film isn't. I found it surprising that Ryan Reynolds also appeared, in really short bursts, in this movie.

Surprising if only because I'm sure Ryan did not come cheap. It's sort of like, what's the fucking point? Sort of like having Vin Diesel voice Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy when all he says, literally, is three words over and over.

Though, at the very least, with Vin, he voiced the character in several different languages, so that made paying him, I'm sure, millions of dollar 'justifiable'. I'm not saying Ryan got $10 million for appearing in this movie, because he appears so little in the movie that it might as well have been spent on an unknown actor, but he still commands a lot of money that didn't really help you in the long run, because this film wasn't commercially successful.

That's not the point, really, but it was something worth pointing out. Gal Gadot, who plays Bill's widow, also did a good job here. I can't really complain much about the cast, the problem is in the scripting and the pacing.

The film just bored the ever-loving shit out of me, what else can I really say BUT that? I wouldn't recommend it, it should have been 20-25 minutes shorter than it actually was. Kevin Costner is good and that's probably the only reason anyone should even consider watching this movie.

Eh, can't really say I enjoyed this.