The premise behind Criminal involves “mind uploading,” or the transference of memory from one person to another. Early in the film, a CIA operative named Bill Pope (Ryan Reynolds) is captured and killed in London by Xavier Heimdahl (Jordi Mollà), a Spanish anarchist hell-bent on literally destroying the world so that it can be reborn—or something like that. Pope had been working with a European hacker named Jan Stroop, codenamed The Dutchman (Michael Pitt), who has written a program that allows him access to and complete control over all U.S. military operations (he can essentially launch nukes from his laptop and no one can do anything about it). Pope is the only one who knows where the Dutchman is hiding, which is primo information for both the U.S. government and Xavier, so his death presents a major obstacle for both.

Enter Dr. Franks (Tommy Lee Jones), a stern-faced researcher who has been experimenting with a surgical process that allows one person’s memories to be “mapped” onto another person’s brain—or something like that. The problem is that he has only done this with mice and is five years away from human trials. That doesn’t stop CIA honcho Quaker Wells (Gary Oldman) from demanding that he perform the operation so that they can get at Pope’s memories and discover the whereabouts of The Dutchman before Xavier does. The other problem is that the process requires a person with an undeveloped frontal lobe, a rare condition usually caused by massive brain damage early in life. Enter Jericho Stewart (Kevin Costner), a hulking death row inmate who has precisely that condition, which has led him to a life of crime and violence because he is incapable of feeling empathy or really caring about much of anything. Jericho has Pope’s memories mapped onto his undeveloped gray matter, which at first appears to make no difference. However, soon he is remembering things he never did and is able to exercise knowledge and skills he never acquired, but that’s not all. Because Pope was a good patriot, father, and husband, his moral soundness starts to infect Jericho’s being, causing him to feel emotions that he has never felt before, which draws him into a protective relationship with Pope’s widow, Jill (Gal Gadot) and his preadolescent daughter, Emma (Lara Decaro), albeit not before first threatening them.

For the most part, Criminal is just a long chase film, with both CIA operatives and Xavier and his minions trying to get their hands on Jericho and his newly implanted knowledge after he escapes and goes on the lam. Director Ariel Vromen, whose last film The Iceman (2014) starred Michael Shannon as a real-life mob assassin who kept his nefarious profession secret from his wife and children, has a slick eye and a good sense of timing. He doesn’t do anything particularly innovative, but he also keeps the film from being overly flashy and ostentatious, relying instead on the good ol’ fashioned virtues of physical action and macho confrontations among various alpha males to carry the day.

Costner was an interesting and ultimately effective casting choice for Jericho; he has certainly played villainous characters and loners before, albeit not one of such a gruff, hulking, unemotional nature. However, as Jericho begins to remember more and more of Pope’s life and experiences, he becomes more and more human, a transformation that Costner performs with astute subtlety. Unfortunately, the film is a little too intent on showing us how bad Jericho is at first, which leads to a number of repetitious scenes of him acting violently and callously toward otherwise innocent people (we get it already—he’s bad). However, by the end of the film he has transformed into an ideal American action hero who self-consciously combines the unrelenting violence of his earlier self with the moral intentions of his transformed self. In other words, Criminal allows us to experience with giddy vicariousness a brutal psychopath wreaking havoc on bad guys for all the right reasons.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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