Grade: D

Last year, in “Self/less,” Ryan Reynolds played a strapping young fellow whose body became host to the consciousness of a dying old man. The arrangement did not work out well. Now in “Criminal,” he’s a guy who’s killed, only to have his consciousness transferred to the brain of another fellow. The result, at least for the audience, is even worse this time around.

In the astronomically silly script, which one can even imagine Luc Besson turning down as ludicrous, Reynolds is Bill Pope, a CIA agent who, over the first fifteen minutes of screen time, we see stalked via ubiquitous cameras and his trusty, all-powerful laptop by a steely-eyed terrorist named Xavier Heimdahl (Jordi Molla), who wants to blow up this corrupt world, and his chief lieutenant Elsa (Antje Traue). Pope’s ever-more-frustrated boss Quaker Wells (Gary Oldman) desperately tries to save his man, but to no avail.

That’s a serious problem, since only Pope had access to a computer genius, code-named The Dutchman (Michael Pitt, who once seemed to have leading man potential, which has long since vanished). The Dutchman, who once worked for Heimdahl but came to think the guy crazy (one can understand his point), has somehow acquired control over all US nuclear weapons, and his erstwhile boss wants that information. To prevent him from getting it, Pope hid The Dutchman away and promised the guy cash for the flash drive—loot he was in process of delivering before things went south for him. Fortunately he was able to hide the cash before Elsa caught up with him.

But where are The Dutchman and that cache of money? That’s what Wells needs to find out, and since Pope is now dead, he calls in Dr. Franks (Tommy Lee Jones, looking exhausted and unwell), a scientist who’s been working on a process to transfer one brain’s memories to another. Unfortunately, the host brain needs particular characteristics that few people possess, and the best candidate is an antisocial, brutal prison inmate named Jericho Stewart (Kevin Costner), who suffered head trauma as a child. He’s enlisted in the experiment without his consent, and then, when it seems to fail, is sent back to jail, only to escape along the way.

As it turns out, however, the experiment did work, though slowly—Pope’s memories come to Jericho in fits and starts. He does remember enough, though, to take him to the home of Pope’s widow Jill (Gal Gadot) and his darling little daughter Emma (Lara Decaro). Contact with them is strained at first—Jericho’s a nasty sort, after all, with no compulsion about hurting people. After a time, however, Pope’s personality begins to affect its host, and Jericho, until now incapable of empathy, begins to feel emotions, and not just anger but sympathy and concern—even love, perhaps.

Of course, that nice quasi-domestic stuff can’t be allowed to interfere with the mayhem, and so Jericho is soon off in pursuit of that money and The Dutchman even as he’s pursued by both Wells and his team, and Heimdahl and his. Lots of fights, car crashes and gun battles follow, and inevitably Jill and Emma will become helpless pawns in the crossfire. But rest assured the world is not destroyed, though given the unlikely plot turns your capacity to suspend disbelief might very well be.

This is the second time lately that Costner has tried to go the tough-guy route, and though he works very diligently at it, the result is even less credible that it was in “3 Days to Kill” (Jericho’s first appearance in his prison cell is a doozy). Ryan, moreover, is curiously anonymous and Gadot completely wasted, while Jones looks like he’s carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Molla comes off more than a little absurd as a guy who can supposedly do anything with a mere touch of a keyboard, and Traue is even worse as a villainess who seems to have escaped from a Sean Connery-era James Bond movie. The worst of the lot, however, is Oldman, an actor who can be subtly brilliant in some roles and laughably terrible in others. Here, sporting a Bronx accent so thick you could cut it with a knife, he’s comically awful; it’s one of the worst performances he’s even given. Technically the picture is proficient enough, but director Ariel Vromen doesn’t generate the level of excitement he and his crew are clearing trying for, and cinematographer Dana Gonzales’ widescreen images sometimes look cloudy, with hand-held moments especially trying. The cautious editing by Danny Rafic and bland background score by Brian Tyler and Keith Power are no help.

As it reaches its absurd final confrontation the movie grows so foolish that in the future it might be used as a cinematic touchstone, as in: “It’s so bad, it’s ‘Criminal.’” Still, one can appreciate it for its unintentional hilarity.

D

There’s a difference between raunchy and tawdry, and it’s a line that this unsavory rom. com crosses all too often. It wants to be sweet and cheeky but comes off sour and tasteless instead.

Irritatingly chirpy Anna Faris plays Ally Darling, a young Boston professional dumped by her latest live-in boyfriend (Zachary Quinto) and fired from her job in advertising by a finger-sniffing boss (Joel McHale) in the first reel. But she seems much more bothered by the fact that a test in one of those ubiquitous women’s magazines indicates that she’s way beyond the average number of “lays” a typical woman has had before linking up with Mr. Right (she’s at 19 as opposed to the average of 10.5). So in a drunken moment of decision at her sister’s pre-wedding reception, she vows to curb her slutty promiscuity and not to get to twenty sexual encounters before finding her soul mate.

Her solution? Find all her previous nineteen “friends” and “re-audition” the ones who weren’t total rejects. To assist her she recruits her randy cross-the-hallway neighbor Colin (Chris Evans), a musician by trade but womanizer by choice, who as a policeman’s son claims to be expert at finding people. In return she’ll let him use her apartment as a hiding place in the mornings when he wants to disappear while his latest conquest dresses and departs.

It’s obvious that these two will eventually bring out the best in one another and prove to be the perfect match. But along the way to this foreordained conclusion we have to deal with multiple flashbacks to the younger Ally’s various encounters, lots of scenes featuring the wedding preparations of her sister (Ari Graynor) and the prodding of her divorced, pushy mother (Blythe Danner) to find the right kind of man for herself, and a few interludes with her more pleasant father (Ed Begley, Jr.). There are also a few cringe-worthy sequences showing her re-connecting with some of those nineteen “possibles,” including two featuring Chris Pratt and Anthony Mackie and a third, the longest, coupling her with a rich, handsome fellow (Dave Annable) her mother considers the perfect catch but she decides is not the one.

But most of the picture, flabbily directed by Mark Mylod, consists of the Ally-Colin relationship, and it’s peppered with sequences that are carefully manipulated to show one or both of them strip down to only the essentials—the dumbest involving a ridiculous game of “strip horse” the two play at the deserted TD Garden one night. Both Faris and the post-“Captain America” Evans certainly boast attractive physiques, but after a while the movie comes to resemble nothing more than an extended striptease.

The two leads get to show off their other talents too, of course. As far as Faris is concerned, that involves “I Love Lucy”-style slapstick, including one scene in which her hair extension abruptly catches on fire and another when she falls on her face, picks herself up, dusts herself off and speeds away to find Colin. She’s game enough, but the shtick comes off pretty weak. Evans gets to show off his ability to sing and strum guitar, but the result doesn’t suggest that a musical career is in the offing. Graynor is treated merely as a limp foil to Faris, but Danner makes the girls’ mother genuinely nasty—something that adds to the picture’s overall unpleasant tone. As to the other “suitors,” Annable is a stiff bore, and neither Pratt nor Mackie is handed much of anything to do. McHale is stuck in a particularly humiliating part, though Quinto fares little better (and is made to look rather like Adam Goldberg’s younger brother).

Visually the picture is okay, but nothing special. The basketball sequence may be dumb, but the setting is nice, and presumably the Celtics franchise got a substantial sum for allowing filming at the location. A major wag of the finger to music supervisor Julia Michels, whose choices for the incredibly large number of musical montages stuffed into the narrative by Mylod come across as especially lame.

Even in a genre notorious for its low quality, “What’s Your Number?” earns a zero.