The Criminal 2002 Horror Movie Review

The claustrophobic British crime thriller gets a twist of international conspiracy in Julian Simpson’s The Criminal. Steven Mackintosh is Jasper Rawlins, the innocent whose one-night stand thrusts him headfirst into a nightmarish murder mystery where he’s the patsy. Hounded by a relentless dinosaur of a detective (Bernard Hill) and shadowed at every step by a gang of crooks, Rawlins plunges into the urban underworld to clear his name and succeeds only in tightening the noose around his neck. One of the more ingenious films to sprout up in a crop of British gangster films at the turn of the century, this paranoid thriller has a cynical, sharp style. Think North by Northwest updated to the modern world of free-market espionage and set in a gloomy world of moral twilight. The cleverness seems contrived at times, but Simpson’s style and attitude never falter. —Sean Axmaker