The Criminal
**
Rated on a 4-star scale
Screening venue: Odeon (Bromborough)
Released in the UK by Downtown on January 12, 2001; certificate 15; 99 minutes;
country of origin UK; aspect ratio 2.35:1
Directed by Julian Simpson; produced by
Mark Aarons, David Chapman, Chris Johnson.
Written by Julian Simpson.
Photographed by Nic Morris; edited by Mark
Aarons.
CAST.....
Steven Mackintosh..... Jasper Rawlins
Bernard Hill..... Detective-Inspector Walker
Eddie Izzard..... Peter Hume
Natasha Little..... Sarah Maitland
Yvan Attal..... Mason
Holly Aird..... Detective-Sergeant Rebecca White
Jana Carpenter..... Grace
The first shot is dark and moody -- one of atmospheric
blues and browns, surrounded by smoke. The dialogue ingratiates itself instantly
-- the man has a speech protesting against the soulless nature of dance music,
and he speaks the truth. He and the woman play flirtatious word games. We
smile. We're involved.
"The Criminal" begins superbly,
with the scene mentioned above and the moments that follow: The young man
is a musician named Jasper Rawlins (Steven Mackintosh), the woman a stranger
named Sarah (Natasha Little). They go to Jasper's flat. A man breaks in,
kills Sarah, Jasper runs off. The police come. They don't buy Jasper's story
-- just ask manipulative rhetorical questions, laugh off his version of events,
send him round in circles, throw insults.
The key police characters are Detective-Sergeant
White (Holly Aird) and Detective-Inspector Walker (Bernard Hill). They're
officious cretins, interested only in finding evidence that supports their
initial theories, impervious to more complicated ideas. They make bets on
the crime scene regarding how long it will take to get a confession. When
White finds evidence that seems to contradict Jasper's identity as the guilty
party, Walker spins round shocked, and demands "You're not going cold on
Rawlins, are you??"
I thought the movie was going to follow through,
and become an indictment of the way bad cops lock up the first guy on the
scene, and find scraps of supporting evidence as an afterthought. Instead,
by the half-hour mark, Jasper is out on bail getting followed by cops and
crooks trying to frame or kill him wherever he turns, and the movie has settled
into a conventional man-on-the-run formula.
There are silly improbabilities, like when the
real killer starts shooting police officers, and they still don't catch on
that Jasper is innocent, and dreadful moments of comic relief, such as a
paranoid American homeless woman who pops up out of nowhere and starts ranting
interminably about some underworld phantom named 'Raphael' -- but the movie's
biggest problem is, quite simply, that it abandons a strong story to become
a series of dumb chases, and even, in the last act, a ludicrously
pseudo-Hitchcockian conspiracy yarn.
What was going on in the minds of the filmmakers?
What possessed them to set up a good story, then whisk the tablecloth from
underneath and let it fall into the land of brainlessness? Far too much cinema
resides there already. If the British film industry is ever to get back on
its feet, it should present us with something strong and original, instead
of making silly copies of the dumbest of Hollywood
clichés.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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