When I first heard about the movie Criminal starring Kevin Costner I automatically thought it looked somewhat bland. Ever since Taken (2008) became a big hit Hollywood has been infatuated with making action movies centered around older actors. Criminal is the newest of these older actor action lead movies to come out and although I didn’t hate it I can’t say that it is great by any means either. It isn’t as bad as the last two Taken sequels, but it sure doesn’t even come close to being as good as the first Taken movie. This isn’t the first old guy stars in an action movie that Kevin Costner has done. A couple of years ago he was in 3 Days to Kill which was mostly a bore. Criminal is also pretty slow and boring although we at least get to see Kevin Costner spread his wings as an actor a little bit.
Criminal is about a CIA agent Bill Pope (Ryan Reynolds) who has cut a deal with a hacker named Jan Stroop (Michael Pitt) who has betrayed an anarchist group set to topple over governments all over the world. Stroop has hacked into the US government weapons grid and can launch any missile at will. Pope is on his way to meet Stroop and give him money in exchange for the codes but Pope never makes it and is killed by the anarchist group. Pope’s supervisor Quaker Wells (Gary Oldman) sets it up for Pope’s body to remain alive by machines so that a brain doctor named Dr. Franks (Tommy Lee Jones) can transfer his memories into a psychopathic murder named Jericho Stewart (Kevin Costner) so that they can get the information of Jan Stroop’s whereabouts. Stewart manages to escape shortly after the surgery and unleashed onto the world as an unemphatic psycho, but soon starts to feel empathy due to Pope’s memories being in his head.
The two biggest names in this movie other than Costner are Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Oldman. Jones plays a doctor with a heart of gold while Oldman plays the authoritative angry police captain type. Neither actors gives a horrible performance but with how good they are it almost seems as if they were both wasted playing such cliched characters. Costner’s character Jericho is somewhat interesting although we have seen similar characters in movies before. This is probably the most interesting character Costner has played since he starred in the movie Mr. Brooks (2007) which was a bit of an underrated thriller and a film I’d say is leaps and bounds more creative than than Criminal. At 61-years-old Costner looks pretty good for his age. If I didn’t know his age watching this movie I would have guessed him closer to 50.
The biggest problems with this movie is that it is pretty slow and the plot is extremely predictable. The only real enjoyment I got out of the movie was watching Kevin Costner play around as the Jericho character. Some of the things he does as Jericho are brutally violent and are almost unintentionally funny is a very dark and twisted way. I appreciated that the filmmakers at least tried to so how brutal the Jericho character was without pulling too many punches. Unfortunatley the filmmakers obviously didn’t feel the need to put that same effort towards the plot which is generic in every sense of the word. I won’t say that it is horrible, but it really is nothing we haven’t seen before in dozens of other movies.
I enjoyed this movie enough to give it my very light approval although I think the only reason for that is because I’m a Kevin Costner fan. If you aren’t a big fan of Costner or his acting abilities I really don’t think you should waste your money on this. Overall Criminal succeeds on some levels, but when it comes to trying to do something original the filmmakers really just didn’t try at all.
Dave’s Rating- ★★★(3) out of ★★★★★(5)
