Emily the Criminal
Emily, who is saddled with student debt and locked out of the job market due to a minor criminal record, gets involved in a credit card scam that pulls her into the criminal underworld of Los Angeles, ultimately leading to deadly consequences.
- Released:
- Runtime: 120 minutes
- Genre: Crime, Drama, Thrillers
- Stars: Aubrey Plaza, Theo Rossi, Megalyn Echikunwoke, Gina Gershon, Jonathan Avigdori, Bernardo Badillo, Craig Stark, Brandon Sklenar
- Director: John Patton Ford
Comments
- julieshotmail - 13 January 2023
This could have been great if not for the character flaws and plot flaws
"Emily the Criminal" has that gritty feel to it; it's about someone down on her luck trying to navigate this bleak world for survival. The unsuspecting ambience feels just right, giving you the feeling that something terrible is about to happen, either now or much later. You just don't know. Top this off with the star presence of the enigmatic Aubrey Plaza, and you have yourself a potential winner. Unfortunately our protagonist remains as the antagonist, as she never becomes someone we want to root for. Her life struggles can be boiled down to a personality disorder, making this character one-dimensional. There is no story otherwise. - dswhitcomb - 7 January 2023
Aubrey Plaza's best work to date.
I enjoyed this movie quite a bit due to Audrey Plaza's solid performance. It's not the strongest story as we don't see a lot of "the Criminal" parts as you would think by the title but this is Ms. Plaza's best work yet. She has just enough grit to be believable yet through that grit we can see her venerability. Her character, Emily, is thrown into the adult world without a security blanket and she is just trying to find her way. She owes a lot of money to a school loan debt company for a degree she didn't finish. She is stuck at a dead end job and she is unable to work her way out of that hole due to a minor blip on her permanent record. She is failing to find the work needed to pay off the loan. Plaza shows us the frustration with all of this without throwing it in our faces. Though she accepts a"job" doing credit card fraud we still root for her to find her way back to a more mundane line of work as her savior. Well that just isn't in the cards for her so she continues to get deeper into her criminal life.
It is there we see how smart Emily truly is and we never doubt she is actually good at her new job. It's not easy to pull off the sympathetic criminal role. Other lesser actors wouldn't be able to convince the audience to feel her struggle every step of the way.
This movie is an easy watch as it's very straightforward. It even has a satisfying ending which is not very common with female led crime dramas. We usually end with a soft landing for the lead but this movie doesn't follow that rule. I liked the ending though it was somewhat foreshadowed about 2/3 the way into the movie. I didn't mind that as stated previously, when we have a complex character such as Emily we should be allowed into her complex world.
