“Criminal” wants to be a tense, morally gray thriller about a man who inherits another man’s memories and becomes a fugitive. It mostly fails. The premise is promising: a convicted criminal gets implanted with a dead CIA agent’s mind to finish a mission, and the resulting chaos plays out across London and Washington. But the execution keeps undercutting itself.
Trailer, via Lionsgate Movies.
Jerico Stewart Takes Over
The setup is solid. Ryan Reynolds plays Bill Pope, a CIA agent who tracks down a hacker called “The Dutchman.” When Pope dies under torture, his memories are transferred into Kevin Costner’s Jerico Stewart, a dangerous ex-convict with a damaged frontal lobe. Costner sells the physical switch from sneering sociopath to uneasy father with real weight, even when the script asks him to feel emotions it hasn’t earned.
Gary Oldman plays Quaker Wells, Pope’s boss, and Tommy Lee Jones plays Dr. Franks, the scientist who performs the transplant. Both actors get the best material in the film, and their scenes together crackle with menace and dry wit. The rest of the cast, including Gal Gadot as Jill Pope and Alice Eve as Marta Lynch, mostly fades into the wallpaper of a plot that doesn’t know what to do with them.
The Dutchman’s Wormhole
The threat is simple: The Dutchman has built a program that could bypass every code protecting the world’s nuclear defenses. He wants to sell it to Russia, convinced the CIA has betrayed him. The CIA learns he is planning to launch ICBMs and start World War III. That’s the stakes, and they’re fine stakes. The problem is that the film spends far too long circling around them.
Jerico’s search for the Dutchman drags through a series of flashbacks, false leads, and chase scenes that never build to anything. He finds the money behind a bookshelf but can’t find the man. He contacts Dr. Franks for medication using Pope’s CIA codes. He develops emotions and draws on Pope’s experience. None of it lands with the force the premise deserves.
What Works
The film has a few strong scenes:
- Costner and Oldman’s face-off in a hotel room
- A tense car chase through London streets
- A quiet moment where Jerico sees a photo of Pope’s family
These moments are sharp, but they’re isolated. The rest of the runtime fills space with exposition dumps, clunky action sequences, and a villain (Jordi Mollà’s Xavier Heimdahl) who feels less like a threat and more like a plot device.
“The mission is in the memories.”
That tagline is accurate, but it also describes the film’s fatal flaw. The memories are the whole story, and the story is thin. There’s no real mystery, no real tension, and no real payoff. The audience knows where the money is hidden from the first flashback; the film just refuses to let Jerico know.
Where It Falls Short
The pacing is the biggest problem. The film is 113 minutes long, and at least half of it is spent telling us what we’ve already seen. The middle section, where Jerico wanders through London trying to remember details he already remembers, becomes a slow-motion echo chamber. The climax, when it finally arrives, feels rushed and anticlimactic after all that buildup.
The film also leans heavily on the idea that the CIA has betrayed The Dutchman. This is supposed to complicate the moral landscape, but it never takes root. The Dutchman is a hacker who built a weapon; the CIA is chasing him. There’s no ambiguity worth caring about.
“Criminal” is a film with a great idea and a terrible grasp of how to execute it. Costner and Oldman elevate material that deserves better. The action is competent, the settings are vivid, and the premise remains intriguing even as the movie fails to deliver on it. But the film is ultimately a hollow shell, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
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