As I scan the many laudatory reviews of this movie posted above, I find myself asking myself just what kind of movies from the past 30 or 40 years these reviewers have been watching, or indeed if they've watched any. No genre ages more quickly and more badly than the "big con" movie, since the whole satisfaction of the viewer hinges on the big final scene - which we know from every "con artist" movie from "The Sting" to Mamet's "House of Games" and which, inevitably, recurs in every familiar detail as the big closing scene of "Criminal" - in which all the characters who have been presented to us throughout the film as having no connection with one another - street-robbers, cops, "mark"s etc. - are revealed - gasp!! - to have secretly been part of some big coordinated scam after all. In a sense, that scene has been "used up" and dramaturgically useless since "The Sting", and all the subsequent "big con" movies of the 80's and 90's, have had to add some very special extra ingredient - such as Mamet's plumbing of the sexual and psychological abysses beneath the "con/mark" relation - in order to be movies of any even limited note. "Criminal" offers no such special angle or special depth and tries to trade on nothing but the - by now hopelessly threadbare - fascination of lives led according to the principle of the double-double-cross and the "nothing is what it seems". Precisely that, however, is the film's psychological downfall in the face of an audience which is - or which one would have assumed ought to be - as familiar by now with the conventions of this genre as it is with those of the mafia movie. The cinema MUST surely have taught us all enough about the lives and work of conmen by now for us to find it ludicrously improbable that either of the two main characters would be willing to expose thousands of dollars of money already "in hand" in order to secure the alleged "sure thing" of a deal that is to net them many thousands more (after all, it is the endemic idiocy of such greed and of the general greed-driven tendency to forget the "bird in the bush" principle that is the very basis of a conman's livelihood). Around this central crying improbability there cluster a dozen others, hardly less egregious: The John C. Reilly character would really have agreed in twenty seconds to the offer of the currency expert not to reveal that the note was a fake in return for a share of the money? Hardly, since it is hard to imagine a simpler way for the mark to find out that the note he was buying WAS indeed a fake than to send the currency expert along with just such an offer? Would he really have permitted any arrangement which might even possibly result in his parting with the note and having in hand, in return, only a CHECK which needed to be taken to a bank and cashed? The idea is ridiculous, since it would clearly involve running the risk of there happening what actually does happen at the bank in the penultimate scene. It seems that filmgoers and DVD-viewers are so desperate for that ever-more-elusive "wow-I-didn't-see-THAT-coming!" kick that large numbers of them are willing, these days, to bring their own willing paralysis of basic cogitative capacities to that "walking dead" genre, the "grifter movie". Well, at least I'll be spared hours of head-shaking incomprehension when I read on here in a couple of months rave review after rave review of a new mafia movie which features a scene in which the rat receives with relief and unconditional enthusiasm the message from the boss: "Sure, I know you helped set up the hit on my kid brother, and I'm not too happy about it. But I really need someone to help me watch out for the arrival of a drugs shipment down at the docks at 3 am tonight, so I'm willing to say: 'let bygones be bygones'. But remember to bring a couple of bags of cement so we both have something to sit on."