Criminal
Plot
Industrialist Xavier Heimdal, has gone rogue, and has ordered his subordinate Jan Strook to create a program to give access to the worlds nuclear missiles.
Strook unable to go through with it, hands himself and the program over to CIA agent Bill Pope. Heimdal finds Pope, but kills him before Pope can tell Heimdal where Strook is.
Now Pope’s boss, Quaker, requests Dr Franks, to take Pope’s memories, and implant them into sociopath Jericho.
As Pope’s memories start flooding into Jericho, so does Pope’s ability to show empathy and compassion, something Jericho has never felt before.
Can Jericho retrieve the memories to find Strook, before Heimdal does?
Direction
Some solid action direction from Ariel Vromen, who I have also reviewed his film The Iceman.
There are several well choreographed car chase sequences, with the standard explosions and car flips.
Cast/Characters
Kevin Costner plays Jericho, who does his best “tough guy” movie, with all the grunts of a ‘guy who doesn’t care’. A weaker effort from him than I’ve seen in the past.
Gary Oldman plays Pope’s boss Quaker. He too gives a more subdued performance than he’s used to. This might be the first time I though his ‘fake accent was a tad grating’
Tommy Lee Jones plays Dr Franks… who creates a tragic hero from a monster…
Alice Eve gets a thankless role as an almost un named associate of Pope and Quaker, and gets killed off without much fanfare or anyone to grieve her death.
Gal Gadot, actually isn’t terrible as Pope’s wife. Most of her scenes are with Costner, as Pope is dead for all but the first five minutes of runtime. She gets the “and” namesake in the closing credits.
Jordi Molla plays Heimdal, and Michael Pitt play Strook (or The Dutchman as he is called throughout the film). His fake accent is atrocious!
And Ryan Reynolds plays Pope in the opening minutes of the film.
Breakdown
Starting with an non conformative opening where the main hero (and played by mega star Reynolds) is unserimoniously killed off in the first few minutes.
It then becomes a slightly convoluted premise, with similar moments to the cult classic Face Off, where the bad guy now has the memories of the good guy, befriends the wife and must bring down the bad guy.
The cast all do well enough with what they work with, but it does feel like a majority of them are either miscast, and are not the right acting type for the role (Jones and Costner are the main culprits).
I quite like the techy score by Brian Tyler that played underneath.
Overall
Okay action/thriller, but with weak performances from strong players (Costner, Jones, Oldman, Reynolds) and a convoluted script, this weakens the overall product.
Passable, but just.
3/5
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