There’s no shortage of ludicrous action movies for teenagers, but let us sing the praises, however mildly and briefly, of far-fetched thrillers meant for adults—like this sober-minded (but nonsensical) piece of espionage fluff from the writers of
Double Jeopardy and
The Rock. When CIA spy Bill Pope (Ryan Reynolds) is killed before he can relay crucial information, his bosses use Science to transfer the electrical impulses that constitute his “memories” to the brain of Jericho Stewart (Kevin Costner), a murderous sociopath whose frontal lobe is sufficiently underdeveloped to allow for such interpolation. Giving a CIA spook’s training and know-how to a psycho goes wrong, of course, if not as outrageously wrong as one might hope. The entertainment value is in Costner’s loose performance, especially when Jericho starts Jekyll-and-Hyding between his own impulses and the influence of the good guy whose memories he inherited. Everything with Bill’s widow (Gal Gadot) and young daughter is perhaps too ridiculous, even for a ridiculous movie, and director Ariel Vromen lets the pace drag. But some day you’ll catch this on cable and think, “Hey, this isn’t bad!”
By
Eric D. Snider