It May Have the Most Generic Title Imaginable But Jackie Earle Haley's Directorial Debut Criminal Activities Delivers the Dirty B Movie Goods
Are there any more beautiful words in the French language than Un Film De Jackie Earle Haley
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The nice thing about having low expectations is that they’re easy to leap triumphantly over. I understandably don’t expect much from the periods in John Travolta and Nicolas Cage’s careers when they went from being massive movie stars and top box-office attractions to being RedBox staples churning out largely interchangeable action movies for the home video market.
The teens were not kind to Travolta, personally or professionally. They were more merciful to Cage but he still struggled mightily to get out of the massive hole he was in financially and professionally and reclaim his A-list status.
Cage is my favorite actor because of his films and his performances but the fact that he is nearly as well known for being terrible with money and having massive debt as he is for his acting makes him painfully relatable for a legendary movie star from a show-business dynasty.
I had low expectations for the last two films I’ve watched and written about for this column and the Travolta/Cage podcast, 2016’s Dog Eat Dog and The Trust and was delighted and surprised to discover that they’re both nifty Neo-Noirs with terrific performances from Cage and Willem Dafoe in Dog Eat Dog and Cage and Elijah Wood in The Trust.
My streak of over-achieving dark comedies about the world of crime continues with 2015’s Criminal Activities. I’ve been morbidly curious about the film since I learned of its existence for the following reasons:
It is the feature film directorial debut of diminutive, weasel-faced character actor Jackie Earl Haley
It stars John Travolta
It has the most hilariously literal title for a crime movie I’ve ever seen
I hadn’t anything good about Criminal Activities, or anything really about it all so I was surprised that it had at least two other qualities that would appeal to me.
Criminal Activities has a surprisingly stacked cast. Haley does double duty as a chatty thug alongside Michael Pitt, Rob (You’re the man now, dog!) Brown, Christopher Abbott, Dan Stevens and finally Edi Gathegi.
I did not realize it going in, but Criminal Activities belongs to a subgenre that I have an enormous amount of affection for: the Tarantino knock-off.
Tarantino wannabes flourished in the direct to video market in the aftermath of the zeitgeist-capturing success of Pulp Fiction in 1994 and largely died out by end of the decade due to the overwhelming failure of almost all of the films.
That makes this 2015 film something of a throwback. It’s also notable for being the only Tarantino-knockoff to involve the actual star of Pulp Fiction. Get Shorty does not count because Elmore Leonard pre-dates Tarantino and was obviously a huge influence on him.
In the ostentatious, hyper-masculine world of Criminal Activities crooks of varying degrees of experience and aptitude divide their time between engaging in various criminal activities (hence the title) and talking verbosely about art and Shakespeare and philosophy.
The lowlifes in Criminal Activities love to talk and they love to tell stories. They are as chatty as they are violent. Travolta has a blast playing a particularly talkative crime boss. Haley is clearly overjoyed to have a legend like Travolta in the cast for his modest movie and gives him the iconic treatment at every turn.
As someone who has devoted YEARS to exploring Travolta’s complete filmography I was excited to see the actor treated like a very big deal. Travolta’s performance here is a real star turn from an actor enjoying himself and enjoying the star treatment.
Criminal Activities opens with a funeral that brings together former high school classmates Zach (Michael Pitt), Bryce (Rob Brown), Warren (Christopher Abbott) and Noah (Dan Stevens), who was bullied relentlessly back in the day but seems to have taken it in stride.
Noah presents Zach, Bryce and Warren with what appears to be an irresistible opportunity to get rich investing in a stock just before it is primed to explode. They think they’re borrowing the money from the seemingly wealthy Noah’s rich dad but they’re actually borrowing it from health-conscious thug Eddie (John Travolta).
That spells trouble when the stock becomes worthless due to insider trading and the overwhelmed quartet find themselves in a very serious debt to a very dangerous man.
Eddie offers the foursome a Faustian bargain: he will forgive their debt if they abduct and hold gangster Marques (Edi Gathegi) hostage until he and his associates are ready to pick him up.
The high school chums are in over their heads. They are not criminals but rather stressed out opportunists trying desperately to extricate themselves from a seemingly impossible situation.
Gathegi has such a forceful, volcanic presence that he’s able to dominate the proceedings and intimidate everyone around him despite being in an exceedingly vulnerable place. Even with his hands tied Marques is still more of a threat than his captors.
When actors move into directing their focus, unsurprisingly, is generally on acting and performances. Criminal Activities works best as an actor’s showcase for Gathegi, Travolta and Haley, all of whom deliver flashy, flamboyant and attention-grabbing turns and the less flashy but solid quartet of actors playing the high school associates.
Like pretty much all Tarantino wannabes, Criminal Activities is VERY pleased with itself. It’s so impressed by its own cleverness that it doesn’t seem particularly concerned with the audience’s reaction. It’s the kind of movie where every element calls attention to itself, but particularly the writing and acting.
Then in the third act things take a turn when it turns out that many of the main characters aren’t at all what they seem. After following faithfully in the footsteps of the writer-director of Resevoir Dogs Criminal Activities closes with a Usual Suspects twist ending that casts everything that precedes it in a strikingly different light.
The screenplay is too clever for its own good and also riddled with plot holes. It’s never apparent, for example, why Noah would want to throw in his lot with people who were cruel to him in high school, although the movie purposefully does reveal the full extent of their sadism until it becomes narratively convenient to do so.
Haley has a nice sense of style as well as a gift for using music to create tension and mood. I wasn’t expecting much from Criminal Activities but I found it to be a very painless and enjoyable way to pass an hour and a half.
It may have a comically generic name but Criminal Activities is surprisingly distinctive if also unmistakably derivative.
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