Criminal (2016)

Criminal arrives with the confidence of a film that has no interest in the conversation. Kevin Costner plays Jerico Stewart, a convict with frontal-lobe damage who receives the memories of a dead CIA agent, and the plot grinds forward with the grim efficiency of a man assembling furniture he does not enjoy. The cast is a standard-issue ensemble of Hollywood leads, joined by Gal Gadot and Antje Traue as the only notable non-American additions, and nobody involved appears to have received a memo about representation. There was no memo. It was 2016, and the memo was still being drafted.

The film's single flirtation with interiority is Jerico's childhood brain injury, which renders him a sociopath until borrowed memories teach him to feel. This is a plot device, not advocacy. The condition exists to be cured by the third act, and the cure is a widow and her daughter. Elsewhere the ledger is clean in the way that only pure genre product can be clean. No LGBTQ characters. No racial consciousness. No climate anxiety. The villains are anarchists and rogue hackers, which means the film cannot even be bothered to critique capital. It critiques cryptography instead.

This is a spy thriller that lectures nobody about anything, a rare commodity in the current marketplace. Its feminist content amounts to a grieving widow being held hostage and later mourned. Its social conscience is nil, and it seems at peace with that. Critics were unkind, audiences shrugged, and the box office offered its own verdict. There is something almost restful about a picture this uninterested in improving us. It wants to transfer memories and detonate a plane. Mission accomplished, more or less.