Criminal

Criminal (2004)

Runtime: 87 minutes

Directed by: Gregory Jacobs

Starring: John C. Reilly, Diego Luna, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Peter Mullan

From: Warner Independent Pictures

I was struggling trying to figure out what I should watch for tonight's review, when I figured that I should make it easy and watch the American remake of the movie I watched last night. The IMDb plot description, then my Letterboxd review.

“Two con artists try to swindle a currency collector by selling him a counterfeit copy of an extremely rare currency bill.” They did in fact change some things for the remake, although the general idea is pretty much identical.

Believe it or not I was one of the few who saw this film (the remake of the 2000 Argentinian film Nine Queens) on the big screen back in '04, as I had seen Nine Queens before then and thought it was great. I didn't remember too much of the remake although I didn't think it was bad.

It does have a nice pedigree; besides the leads being John C. Reilly, Diego Luna and Maggie Gyllenhaal, it was directed by longtime Soderbergh collaborator Gregory Jacobs, was produced by Soderbergh, Jacobs and George Clooney and it was even co-written by old Stephen, using the pen name Sam Lowry, a moniker we likely all know and can appreciate.

Overall, the movie is far from bad; as it mostly follows the original movie from Argentina (the biggest change is that instead of trying to sell a forged set of rare stamps, they're trying to sell a forged piece of rare currency) pretty slavishly, working from those bones it should at least be fine and it was. The biggest problem is that this version is almost a half hour shorter than the original and thus some elements were discarded and trying to truncate the rest does hurt it. Thus, the original is better than the remake, as is almost always the case.

It doesn't mean it's not worth seeing, though (I rated it as 3 1/2 stars while Nine Queens got a 4 1/2 from me). The three leads all put in quality performances; Reilly is great at playing a real A-hole character, like the one he portrays here. And heaven knows how many times there have been American remakes of foreign films that turned out to be not so good... or downright putrid. At least this movie wasn't that.

I'll return Sunday night.