Delayed Reaction: Emily the Criminal

Premise: A woman in financial trouble picks up a dangerous new job committing credit card fraud.

 

My life is the result of luck and a good head on my shoulders. I don’t know the exact balance. I’m fortunate to come from a stable middle-class family. I don’t have any serious medical conditions. I’ve even had luck with the few bad mistakes I’ve made. Things like the couple times I drove drunk when I was younger, I didn’t have an accident or get a DUI. At the same time, I mostly make good decisions. I rarely take needless risks. I keep my anger and other outwardly negative qualities in check. So, it’s always interesting to watch a movie like Emily the Criminal.

 

Emily (Aubrey Plaza) has mistakes and a few bad breaks that have followed her for years. She has college debt but no college degree and has a minor criminal record that gets counted the same as if she’d murdered someone in the eyes of prospective employers. That said, you see how she acquits herself day to day and you understand how sometimes bad results and bad luck are correlated. With the wrong breaks, I could imagine myself being in a situation similar top Emily’s yet I also have some personality traits that make me think I’d be doing better than her. It’s no surprise that Emily finds credit card fraud alluring. It’s the kind of crime that she can convince herself is ultimately harmless while feeding into her bad impulses. That it eventually escalates into something much more severe is a case of bad decisions turning into bad luck.

 

Plaza is a very appealing lead for this movie. Her brand of sarcastic likability makes her a good anti-hero. She’s oddly most charming when she’s being mean. In the case of Emily, that allows her to bring a lot of history to the character with little explanation. You find out she has an assault charge and you immediately know it was a scenario where the other person probably deserved it. I have no trouble believing that she is a bad interview for a job, although I can also see that she’d probably be pretty good at a job that actually challenges her. So, it’s a lot of fun to see her find success with the credit card fraud and come to life in the tensest moments.

 

I will say, this movie does rely way too much on Emily making a lot of dumb mistakes. Mistakes like setting up an exchange by her apartment or hitting the same store too often need a little more explanation than “she just wasn’t thinking”. That late into the movie, it should be more about her hubris but it gets attributed more to her carelessness, which runs contrary to the idea that she’s very good at this. There were just a few too many decisions in this movie that felt like they happened to create plot at the expense of building a consistent character and character journey. Ultimately the ending does reach a satisfying conclusion, but not all the beats to get there felt earned.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend