Is it possible for 3 actors to peak 24 years ago? When you look at the history of Tom Cruise , Jack Nicholson , and Demi Moore and a great serious role that they were lucky enough to get, one could argue very strongly that the best movie all three of them were  in was “A Few Good Men” , which came out in 1992.

As far as Tom Cruise he has never been better in any movie, and that includes “Born on the Fourth of July” which came out in 1989. For some unknown and insane reason Cruise was not even nominated for a best actor or even best supporting actor academy award proving once again that there are some major problems with the voting for this award. Jack Nicholson was nominated for best supporting actor and Demi Moore, in arguably her best ever movie role was not nominated for any award which considering her great performance in this movie is ridiculous. Rob Reiner was not even nominated for a best Director Oscar for this movie, which is another snub for one of the best movies he has ever made. The movie was nominated for a best picture Oscar but did not win, in 1992 the movie “The Unforgiven”, which is another great movie won. I will be reviewing that movie in this blog as well.

The acting in this movie was some of the best I have ever seen and this is largely due to the incredible on point writing of Aaron Sorkin , who was also ignored by the academy for this great screenplay.  In my opinion A Few Good Men is one of the best pictures of the last 25 years and for all who have not seen it, owe it to themselves to see this great movie.

IMDB – A Few Good Men

According to Dictionary.com, the adjective plausible means:

Having an appearance of truth or reason; seemingly worthy of approval or acceptance; credible; believable:
a plausible excuse; a plausible plot.

The entire premise of the movie “Criminal” is about the process of injecting the memories of one human being who has died into another person who is alive and is a dangerous criminal. Unfortunately the fact that a medical procedure like this is impossible is irrelevant to everyone who decided to make this ridiculous movie. Perhaps 500 years from now something like this will be possible through a brain transplant or some other means using computers but most likely not from injecting cells from one brain to another brain.  Had this movie been set in the distant future then perhaps it would have been a better experience, but this movie is set in the present day and from the beginning idea of transferring the memories of one brain to another is downright stupid and from there there is no reason to continue watching this mess.

For some unknown reason, Hollywood producers seem to be in love with the concept of one character becoming another character and having the memories of another person.  The movie “Face Off” is one example of this,   “Selfless” , which came out last year starting Ryan Reynolds , who is also in this movie is another example.  There are several other movies over the years with this theme of personality transfer and the plausibility and believe-ability of an idea like this means nothing to the producers. Perhaps the box office numbers for this idea has worked in the past, so the producers believe that if it works once then it will just have to work again.

Making matters worse is that the overall story of Criminal is a bad one. Some kind of spy played by Ryan Reynolds is killed before he is able to give valuable information to his CIA bosses about a mastermind who is trying to obtain software that can control nuclear devices. The idea to then inject his memories into an insane criminal played by Kevin Costner really makes no sense here but perhaps the thought was that this experiment was to see if injecting the personality of a good person into an insane criminal would make the criminal a better person? This stupid idea also does not work in this movie.

Kevin Costner has made a good number of bad movies lately, the last few include McFarland USA and Black and White . I was also surprised to see great actors like Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Oldman in this bad movie and it made me think that there must not be too many good scripts out there for quality actors anymore because this was a pretty bad movie that should definitely be missed.

The story behind this movie is a good one; have a very rich Martha Stewart-like billionaire woman getting caught insider trading. Then have her go to prison and lose her business and all her assets. This premise mostly makes no sense because just going to prison for 5 months would not result in the loss off a large fortune or a company, but for the purposes of this story this rich woman going broke very quickly creates the second act when she goes broke. Underlying this story is the main characters bad childhood which included several foster homes and eventually an orphanage. Her lack of a real childhood is the reason why she drives herself to being extremely rich by starting her own business.

After getting out of prison the main character played by Melissa McCarthy has to rely on the help of her former assistant played by Kristen Bell to keep her off the streets. What follows for this formerly very rich woman who is now practically homeless, is a period of wallowing around and some humorous dialogue and physical comedy followed by plan to use a girl-scout-like troupe of teenage girls to start a company that sells brownies similar in concept to Girl Scout cookies. The physical comedy in this movie is nothing new but the humorous dialogue at times is hard to follow due to its rapid-fire nature and obscure references, one involving the actor Benedict Cumberbatch which made no sense and was not funny. There is a good deal of foul language in this movie so its definitely not for kids, especially at the end when the overuse of a common phrase for oral sex is used way too many times, probably because they thought it would be funny to repeat it over and over again unnecessarily. Some parts are funny and the proof was some laughs in the audience, but not enough to make a below average story work for the whole two hours. “The Boss” is another example of the clout to get a movie made rather than the quality of a great script written by someone who is a talented and funny screenwriter.

This movie should be seen by big fans of Melissa McCarthy, but probably missed by most everyone else.

The Boss – IMDB