There’s enough pomp, violence, and foul-mouthed thugs in Jackie Earle Healey’s Criminal Activities to do some classic Tarantino good. The film however views like a mere Pulp Fiction pastiche, doggedly dropping f-bombs and delivering obnoxiously acerbic lectures to its in the throes protagonists. But irreverence is what’s most characteristic about Healey’s debut feature—irreverence is a friend to a film like this. The mania that his iteration of Freddy Krueger lacked feels present here, both from his admirable direction and solid performance as a not-shitting-around henchman to a dangerous mob boss.
The film opens to a quartet of high school friends whose sudden reunion at a funeral turns into a business pitch. The class doofus (Dan Stevens) presents a squeaky clean investment plan for a pharmaceutical company on which the four of them invests. Unbeknownst to them, they’re investing mafia money. Pharma co. shuts down and the stocks tank not a month after, and the class cool guy (Michael Pitt)—now an irascible suit in the cutthroat panorama that is the corporate—gets thrown in the trunk of a car and ordered to meet the “benefactor” who’s now concerned about being paid back. Lesson to be learned here: do not make business decisions while on drugs—it’s a death wish.
Christopher Abbott, Michael Pitt, Rob Brown, and Dan Stevens in Criminal Activities. Photo via RLJ Entertainment.
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Criminal Activities is that type of crime comedy: self-consciously humorous, despicably derivative, and burdened with begrudging skepticism that makes the sub-genre look like it’s so full of itself (which it probably is).
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John Travolta’s mob boss personifies the film’s most revolting quality: instead of telling his borrowers that they’re practically screwed, he schools the four about quantum physics and the rules of economics. He’s that type of mafia. That type that tries to be Marlon Brando and fails, kale shake and all. Criminal Activities is that type of crime comedy: self-consciously humorous, despicably derivative, and burdened with begrudging skepticism that makes the sub-genre look like it’s so full of itself (which it probably is).
Yet in Healey’s direction the film manages to move away from the pitfalls of being a pastiche and a parody, which in my book Suicide Kings does perfectly. There’s plenty to indulge on in this abhorrently self-indulgent crime comedy. Edi Gathegi’s thug, for one is delightfully loquacious, lecturing his captors about the gun they’re carrying, in a manner of fashion that’s elegantly gung-ho (if that’s even possible). Like Travolta’s mob boss, Gathegi’s thug labors through an entire curriculum of firearms and weaponry just to make a point. Which is fine so long as the performers put in the work, something that both of them ably do.[/column]
John Travolta and Jackie Earl Healey in Criminal Activities. Photo via RLJ Entertainment.
The dynamic of the quartet forced to graduate from class crooks to legitimate criminals is interesting to me, irked as I am by the film’s rather trite attempt to lend these characters what the film thinks passes for character development. The intrigue in the film is in how in such a remotely different situation, the institution that is high school is carried with the four. There is still hierarchy: the cool guy is still bullish, the doofus still the receiving end of that bullishness. The film’s denouement stems from this notion, ending with a twist that gives The Usual Suspects a run for its money. Does that make Criminal Activities–pompous, revolting, and self-indulgent–from the parodic, self-absorbed crime comedies of recent past? I’m at an impasse as usual.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44CRX4Oki98
