Wait. Didn’t filmgoers just get a Ryan Reynolds mind-switching thriller? That would be last year’s Self/less, in which Reynolds’ mortal coil becomes a vessel for a dying tycoon’s consciousness. In Criminal, Reynolds’ mind is the one that is relocated. During a botched operation in London, Reynolds’ CIA agent Bill Pope is murdered by anarchists, leaving the location of a hacker informant—and his program that can seize control of any military asset on the planet—locked inside the dead man’s brain. Enter neuroscientist Dr. Franks (Tommy Lee Jones), drafted by station chief Wells (Gary Oldman) to salvage this crucial information from Bill’s lifeless gray matter and imprint it on a living subject.
The wrinkle is that Franks needs a subject with an exceedingly rare type of frontal lobe disorder, and the only available candidate is Jericho Stewart (Kevin Coster), a murderous sociopath who has spent the majority of his life in solitary confinement. Nothing bad could come of this, right? After Franks’ procedure is completed, Jericho naturally escapes, setting out to find a cache of money Bill secreted away. Unfortunately, Jericho also begins to experience new sensations like empathy and affection, which complicate his otherwise ruthlessly self-interested and violent approach to problems.
Criminal is a fairly ludicrous film—no surprise that scripters Douglas Cook and David Weisberg also penned The Rock—and director Ariel Vroman doesn’t do much with its out-there premise, sticking to a well-worn and thoroughly generic spy action template. The cast, including Gal Gadot as Bill’s widow, is mostly just sleepwalking through the proceedings. Costner is the exception: Playing against type as a hair-trigger, amoral brute, his portrayal teeters between grotesquely frightening and unintentionally funny. Yet he’s by a wide margin the most interesting element in Criminal, which would be unmemorable sans his unnerving, surprisingly pitiable performance.
