Criminal is a second-generation photocopy of a David Mamet cryptogram, and like most cinematic reproductions, it’s an overly familiar, less distinct version of its predecessors. Faithfully adapted from Fabián Bielinsky’s 2002 Nine Queens – itself a charming if derivative riff on Mamet duplicity – by first-time writer/director Gregory Jacobs, the film is a talkative, economical diversion about two con men involved in the swindle of their lives. And as with all stories of conniving crooks out to hoodwink their “marks,” it offers the obligatory gaggle of double-, triple-, and quadruple-crosses designed to keep its central, overriding deception carefully hidden from view. Unfortunately, fool me once…
Rodrigo (Diego Luna) is a scruffy small-time hood who, while pulling a chump change scam on casino waitresses, meets Richard Gaddis (John C. Reilly), a well-dressed career bunco artist who saves the kid from being arrested and takes him under his wing as an apprentice for the day. Gaddis is like a guardian angel sent down from criminal heaven, and Reilly suavely uses his rapid-fire elocution and dark, tiny eyes (hidden amidst the actor’s considerably puffy cheeks, crinkled brow, and bulbous nose) to convey the deadly, snake-like untrustworthiness and craven avarice of a man for whom life is just one big game. It’s not long before Richard is teaching Rodrigo how to bilk naïve old ladies and flustered waiters out of cash, but the stakes of their day-long tutorial are dramatically raised when they’re offered the opportunity to sell a forged copy of a priceless monetary certificate to a businessman (Peter Mullan) who’s staying in the hotel where Richard’s sister Valerie (Maggie Gyllenhaal) works.
Though the story has been shifted from Argentina’s grimy urban streets to sunny L.A. and a racial and socio-economical component has been thrown into the mix – Richard’s prejudiced comments against the working-class Mexican Rodrigo, as well as Jews and African-Americans, is a natural extension of his unwarranted superiority complex – Jacobs hews closely to his source material. Yet his script’s catalogue of crime film clichés (the one big last score, the mentor-tutor relationship, the con-within-a-con story structure) strands Luna and Reilly’s fine complementary performances in a tediously rehashed web of deceit. The snappy, rat-a-tat-tat Mamet-ish dialogue moviegoers have come to expect from hard-bitten movie capers only sporadically appears, such as when Richard sums up insurance companies’ ruthlessness by telling Rodrigo, “The good hands at Allstate will choke you ‘till your f---ing eyes pop out.” Jacobs regularly shoots dialogue-heavy scenes from behind Reilly, and aside from giving us numerous chances to examine the back of the actor’s sizeable neck, such a cinematographic choice ultimately reinforces the feeling that, in an increasingly predictable genre, Criminal is bringing up the rear.
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