Charles Manson might step carefully if confined to a cell with Jericho Stewart (Kevin Costner). When we first meet him in Criminal, Jericho is chained to the bars and fed with a box dropped through the overhead grating. Glowering and hard-faced, Jericho lacks empathy, emotion, impulse control. He killed those who have offended him and has no remorse, only resentment over his captivity.
Jericho isn’t an ideal guinea pig for a CIA experiment in memory transfer, but in Criminal, national security trumps all else. A CIA agent has been brutally murdered in London without giving up his secret. The agency’s London chief (Gary Oldman) wants to know what the agent knew—the identity of a brilliant hacker, Dutchman, who has written a program to override control over the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Tommy Lee Jones plays the rueful-looking neurosurgeon who conducts the transplant of the agent’s memories into Jericho’s brain, warning the results will be uncertain and unstable. He isn’t kidding.
Criminal is a decent enough thriller whose science-fiction plot trigger is ultimately less interesting than the digital surveillance anxiety running through the film like a minor-key motif. Everyone is tracking everyone else. And in a world where the U.S. government is dumb enough to store its secrets in a place where WikiLeaks needed only a single disgruntled sergeant to access them, and where cyber dreamers put their faith in clouds, why couldn’t tech-savvy renegades hold the Earth hostage? In Criminal, that renegade is a Spanish millionaire anarchist (played with cold fanaticism by Jordi Mollà) who vows to bring down all governments and corporations in a conflagration if necessary. His femme fatale adjutant is a former German special operations agent with ice for blood. The Spaniard wants the Dutchman’s program and will kill him to get it. Meanwhile, the Dutchman is negotiating with the Russians…
Israeli director Ariel Vromen stages the action efficiently with only one of two lapses into the pyrotechnic pileups that have become de rigueur in the genre. Although Jericho has been clinically diagnosed as lacking empathy, none of the characters, whether good guys or bad, except Jones’ surgeon, show a glimmer of emotion as they rationalize their deeds. Jericho is brutal but so is everyone else.
Costner is the one actor in this set piece who shines, not only in his manic destructive moments (he carries some of those with panache) but when the dead agent’s memories begin to surface—a flood that rises after he tracks down the agent’s wife (Gal Gadot) and daughter. Costner’s face registers confusion over feelings he never knew were possible. He might become a better man—if he survives the murderers around him and shakes the debilitating ringing in his head left by the surgery.
Criminal
Kevin Costner
Gal Gadot
Directed by Ariel Vromen
Rated R
