Criminal

Is there anything more depressing than watching a good actor deliver a bad performance? What might be forgivable in a novice becomes painful when it comes from someone whose work has been consistently respectable for decades. I went into Criminal with tempered expectations, but I had at least hoped the cast would provide some relief from what seemed likely to be a rote and overly fanciful spy thriller. So imagine my disappointment when not one, but three actors whom I’ve appreciated for most of my moviegoing life all managed to look ridiculous in the same film.

Kevin Costner delivers every line in a nigh-incomprehensible rasp that indicates he either recently became a heavy smoker or just thought Christian Bale’s Batman voice sounded cool. Gary Oldman delivers the most regionally ambiguous American accent of his career as a manic CIA honcho/trampler of civil liberties. Tommy Lee Jones vacillates between looking entirely disengaged with his surroundings and furrowing his brow with all the uncertainty of a man who might’ve left his stove on. But the sins of the cast do not end there, as nearly every frame in which Ryan Reynolds appears was shown in the trailers, and Gal Gadot carries all the dramatic presence of an especially well-made mannequin.

Criminal is one of the laziest pieces of filmmaking to come along so far this year. The majority of its exposition is established through on-screen captions that explain every location and character description, and any pertinent information not literally spelled out is dumped on the audience through dialogue so blunt it could’ve been used by Costner’s character to beat someone to death. Though I liked director Ariel Vromen’s Michael Shannon vehicle The Iceman (at least more than I like Criminal), he seems to have borrowed the worst parts of a half-dozen other bad action films, which makes a perverse sort of sense, as the script was penned by The Rock scribes Douglas Cook and David Weisberg. When the villain of your international sci-fi spy thriller is a Spanish anarchist named after a Norse god, you can safely assume the writers were not putting a great deal of effort into revisions.

While there is some fun to be had in watching Costner’s unrestrained id go on a killing spree through the first two acts, the plot is too absurdly predictable and convoluted to allow for even the faintest hint of any eventual catharsis. When the inevitable redemption plot kicks in out of nowhere in the last half-hour, what little enjoyment might’ve been eked out of the preceding 90 minutes is ruined. When the climactic showdown finally arrived, I just found myself missing Untouchables-era Costner. I’d even take another stab at Waterworld before I’d try to sit through Criminal again. Better still, I’d revisit all three hours of JFK to restore my faith in Costner, Jones and Oldman in one fell swoop. I can only imagine that a studio executive somewhere recognized that this film couldn’t be sold on its own dubious merits, and stumbled on the bright idea of marketing the inclusion of Reynolds and Gadot, hot off  Deadpool and Batman v. Superman, before audiences could learn enough to stay away. Said executive should have his memories surgically replaced with mine so that he might be forced to relive the harm he did to my weekend. Rated R for strong violence and language throughout.