Here’s a recipe for the ideal man: Take the speed and ruthlessness of a brain-damaged sociopath and combine them with the smarts and tenderness of a CIA agent who’s also a husband and father. Yet for some reason, the new movie about this champion is titled not The Perfect Guy, but Criminal.
That apparently refers to Jerico (Kevin Costner), who lacks all decency and empathy because he was abused as a child by his father. (So he’s a monster, but a victim, too.) Since he has “frontal lobe syndrome,” he’s the ideal temporary recipient of the consciousness of nice-guy spy Bill (Ryan Reynolds), who was just tortured to death by a Spanish anarchist with a Nordic name, Heimdahl (Jordi Molla).
There’s something about Reynolds’ male-model looks, it seems, that makes filmmakers want to disfigure him. Criminal is no Deadpool, though. It packs only a handful of ironic asides, and they’re all allocated to Costner. (While we’re on the subject of Reynolds’ odd career, by the way, let’s note that it’s been less than a year since the actor was seen in Self/less, playing a body implanted with another man’s mind.)
Bill dies in London, and has stashed a Dutch hacker (Michael Pitt) without telling anyone where the guy is. The computer whiz can control the U.S. military arsenal from his laptop, so he’s frantically sought by CIA London station chief Quaker Wells (Gary Oldman with some sort of American accent). Also striving to make “a deal better than Snowden got” with the Dutchman are Heimdahl and the Russians — and, most likely, Apple and Google.