PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 9/10/04)

Your take on Criminal will hinge on whether you caught Fabian Bielinsky’s 2001 Nine Queens, the super-slick Argentinean grifter flick about a couple of con artists who reluctantly team up for The Big Score after meeting the same day.  Yep, remake fever is rampant this season, and Criminal—the directorial debut of Steven Soderbergh’s longtime assistant director, Gregory Jacobs—is an L.A.-flavored retread with a stellar cast of indie mainstays and an unabashedly copycat screenplay. If it ain’t broke, or so it goes, but as cowritten by Jacobs and Soderbergh (under the Brazil-ian pseudonym Sam Lowry) with a deafening mantra of "What Would David Mamet Do?" Criminal adds no real surprises to the original, its plot twists not quite turned as tightly.  On the other hand, newbies looking for an easy-breezy Ocean’s Eleven-and-a-Half should get a kick out of this frugally low-key, innocuous cover song of a caper.

Like the hardened version of his Hard Eight hustler, John C. Reilly is outright riveting, playing against sad-sack type as seasoned swindler Richard Gaddis. The stars have miraculously aligned when Richard intercepts a fresh-faced Latino named Rodrigo (Y tu Mama Tambien’s Diego Luna) blowing an easy short-change scam, because Richard just so happens to need a partner-in-crime.  The financially desperate protégé suspiciously goes along with his new mentor, and after a few lessons that afternoon in the small-time scam, the two stumble onto a one-time opportunity to make six figures in a seemingly foolproof (isn’t it always?) hotel room swindle involving an antique silver certificate. The other human variables of the fraud—namely Maggie Gyllenhaal as Richard’s manipulative concierge sister and Peter Mullan as the mark, an Irish currency collector about to leave the country due to U.S. tax matters—are barely dynamic characters fleshed out only by the professionalism of compellingly watchable actors. As every movie of this type asks, who’s conning whom? Subtly gaining momentum as it dexterously glides through pages of good-time, snappy dialogue, Criminal offers no time to catch your breath, let alone enough to think through its reality-stretching story flaws and subtext-lacking motives.

—Aaron Hillis