Criminal

If you were to look at the poster for Criminal without any context, you’d assume you were looking at the casting sheet for a billion-dollar summer tentpole. You’ve got Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman, Tommy Lee Jones, Gal Gadot, and a pre-megastardom Ryan Reynolds. It is an absolute powerhouse of a lineup, the kind of assembly that usually requires a Marvel contract or a Scorsese phone call. Yet, this movie basically evaporated from the collective consciousness the moment it hit the “New Releases” bin. I watched this on a Tuesday night while trying to ignore a persistent itch on the bottom of my foot that no amount of scratching could satisfy, and Jerico’s grunt-heavy performance felt like a soulmate to my own physical frustration.

Released in 2016, Criminal arrived at a weird crossroads in cinema. We were deep into the "superhero or bust" era of theatrical releases, and the mid-budget, high-concept R-rated thriller was already starting to gasp for air. It’s a movie that feels like it was written in 1996, filmed in 2015, and edited by someone who had just seen The Bourne Supremacy for the first time and thought, "Yeah, let's make it look like the camera is being held by a man falling down a flight of stairs."

A High-Concept Headache

The premise is pure B-movie gold, or at least copper. Ryan Reynolds plays Bill Pope, a CIA agent who gets killed while trying to protect a hacker known as "The Dutchman" (Michael Pitt, doing his best "I'm a weird genius" routine). To find the hacker's whereabouts and stop a global nuclear catastrophe, the CIA decides to perform a radical, experimental surgery. They take Pope’s memories and shove them into the brain of Jerico Stewart (Kevin Costner), a death-row inmate with frontal lobe damage that makes him incapable of feeling empathy or processing emotions.

It’s essentially Face/Off if you swapped the faces for hard drives. Kevin Costner spends the first forty minutes of the movie looking like he’s trying to remember if he left the oven on, which, to be fair, is exactly what a sociopath with a CIA agent’s memories should look like. Watching a grizzled, post-Yellowstone (2018) vibes Costner grunt his way through London while suddenly knowing how to speak French and tie a Windsor knot is genuinely entertaining in a "how did we get here?" kind of way.

The Stunts and the Scenery

Director Ariel Vromen (who previously did the much tighter The Iceman) treats London like a giant, gray obstacle course. The action choreography is punchy and mean-spirited, leaning heavily into the "R" rating. Jerico doesn't fight like a trained agent; he fights like a man who has spent twenty years in a concrete box and has the impulse control of a toddler in a candy store. There’s a specific sequence involving a van and a bridge that feels refreshingly physical. You can tell they actually crashed these vehicles; the crunch of metal has that satisfying, non-CGI weight that is becoming increasingly rare in our current era of "The Volume" and green-screen landscapes.

However, the pacing is a bit of a rollercoaster. The film wants to be a frantic race against time, but it keeps stopping to explore Jerico’s burgeoning humanity. He visits Pope’s widow, played by Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman), and the scenes between them are bizarrely tender given that he looks like a man who would kill you for a ham sandwich. Tommy Lee Jones shows up as the neuroscientist responsible for the procedure, and he looks about as enthusiastic as a man waiting for a root canal, while Gary Oldman spends the entire movie shouting into phones as the high-strung CIA chief. It’s a JFK (1991) reunion that nobody asked for, but I’m glad we got it anyway.

Why It Vanished into the Void

So, why don’t we talk about Criminal? For one, it’s a tonal mess. It oscillates between being a gritty exploration of identity and a movie where a guy gets beaten up with a toolbox. It’s also a victim of the "Deadpool Effect." Ryan Reynolds was killed off in the first act of this movie just as Deadpool (2016) was redefining his career, leaving audiences wondering why they were stuck with a moping Kevin Costner instead of the "Merc with a Mouth."

The film also struggled with a marketing campaign that couldn't decide if this was a sci-fi epic or a standard "Dad Thriller." In an era where audiences were shifting toward either massive franchises or prestige streaming content, Criminal felt like a relic. It’s the kind of movie that used to thrive on basic cable on a Saturday afternoon, but in the 2010s, it just felt like a $30 million budget being set on fire for our amusement.

Despite its flaws, there’s something oddly compelling about it. Kevin Costner’s performance is actually quite brave; he’s willing to be genuinely unlikable for a large portion of the runtime. He isn't playing a hero; he's playing a broken machine that’s being forced to feel. It’s messy, over-the-top, and frequently ridiculous, but it has more personality than half of the polished, focus-grouped thrillers hitting Netflix today.

Stuff You Didn't Notice

Interestingly, the production was plagued by the reality of filming in a post-9/11 London. The crew had to jump through massive hoops to film the high-speed chase sequences near government buildings, which explains why some of the geography feels a bit disjointed. Also, pay attention to the score. It’s a collaboration between Brian Tyler (Iron Man 3) and Keith Power, and it does a lot of the heavy lifting in making the "memory flashes" feel appropriately disorienting. It’s an electronic, pulsing heartbeat that keeps the movie moving even when the script starts to sag under the weight of its own technobabble.

Criminal is the ultimate "I'm sick on the couch and nothing else is on" movie. It’s got enough star power to keep you watching and enough weirdness to keep you wondering what the screenwriter was eating. It’s not a masterpiece, but in a world of sanitized blockbusters, seeing Kevin Costner growl his way through a lobotomized Jason Bourne routine is a specific kind of fun that’s worth a ninety-minute investment.