Aubrey Plaza gives a mesmeric performance in the underwhelming Los Angeles set crime drama, Emily the Criminal, which strains for a timely relevance but collapses under the weight of generic plotting and contrivance. It’s a shame that the film stutters, rather than soars, because Plaza is a genuinely mercurial screen presence. In recent years, she has done impressive work playing a line of complicated women, from a social media obsessive in Ingrid Goes West, to a strange and multilayered turn in Black Bear.
John Patton’s debut film is an initially intriguing fit for Plaza’s outsized talents. The world peeping at the edges of Emily the Criminal thrums with a very contemporary resonance, especially for the current millennial generation who are cursed with a lifetime of student debt and financial insecurity. Burdened with a failed arts degree, $75,000 of student debt, and a DUI conviction which has limited her employment capabilities, Emily (Plaza) gets a job working for a food delivery service, but soon finds herself getting involved in the morally duplicitous underworld of credit card scamming when one of her colleagues gifts her a mysterious number for an extra shift. She soon falls under the cabal of Youcef (a charming Theo Rossi), who dangles the tantalising opportunity to make $200 an hour as a dummy shopper.
It’s a simple, crudely perfunctory crime: Emily has to visit a store to make purchases using fake credit cards loaded with stolen information with the caveat that she doesn’t mess with ATMs, go to customers’ homes, or visit stores more than once. The first job is relatively low-stakes, but the second job ends in a violent, bloody assault. The film is at its best in these early scamming sequences, which are scarily tense and thrillingly staged. As the purchases get bigger, Emily quickly falls into the slipstream of criminality. The film refreshingly doesn’t judge Emily for the moral murk and immorality of her crimes. In fact, the film actively manipulates us so that we sympathise with her desperate situation. Similar to Tony Montana or Travis Bickle, she is an anti-heroine that chimes with the times.
The role relies on very little of Plaza’s comedic prowess, though her eyes still glint with a sense of mischief, especially in a pair of terse, edgy interview scenes that almost bookend the film. The latter interviewer, zestily played by a seldom seen Gina Gershon, bristles with a righteous anger about the culture of corporate greed. It is in these moments that the film is most in tune with the contemporary frustrations but elsewhere is sloppy and lacks finesse. Emily, who begins the film as shrewd and whip-smart, implausibly starts to make rookie mistakes. Ford’s film also never properly interrogates the possibility that she could be hurting other innocent people with her scams.
Emily and Youcef become romantically entangled, much to the chagrin of his cousin and crime associate Khali (Jonathan Avigdori), and it’s at this point that the film starts to really lose its dramatic footing in favour of an under-heated romance and boilerplate genre trappings. Emily the Criminal gestures towards a contemporary relevance, but soon descends into an awkwardly plotted and flavourless denouement that fizzles out disappointingly in spite of Plaza’s committed performance.
