Review: Emily the Criminal (2022)

A determination not to be fucked with

Emily the Criminal (2022)
Written and directed by John Patton Ford

The underfoot underbelly of American criminality, the so-called "organized shoplifting" rings of the Bay Area in California, has been the focus of much attention these days. A desperate man goes into a store like a Walgreens or a Target and strips a couple of shelves' worth of toiletries or household cleaning products, dumping them in a carryall. Pushing his way out of the store with intimidating looks all around, lest anybody try to stop him, he escapes with his pitiful loot to a buyer of some kind. Surveillance footage and videos taken by bystanders -- and sometimes by the criminals themselves -- goes viral. Republicans use the incidents to condemn San Francisco in general; conservative local developers, business shills, and keyboard jockeys use the same videos to further a "doom loop" narrative about the city.

(Man, I hope that when I read that a few years from now all this will seem quaintly nostalgic. "Doom loop!" LOL!)

Aubrey Plaza in “Emily the Criminal“

In "Emily the Criminal," a debut directoral effort by a man with the pompous name of John Patton Ford, Aubrey Plaza plays a criminal who is almost that low on the ladder. In the scam she gets pulled into, she's merely one cog in a long process that goes like this:

Your credit card number is stolen, maybe by a hacker or by someone going through your unshredded recycling. The number, and hundreds like it, are sold to a ringleader. This person possesses a machine that manufactures working, passable credit cards.

A card is then given to a "dummy shopper" with an assignment to buy a certain large TV. Enter Emily, who slaves at a catering business in L.A. in order to keep up with her student loans because she already has a criminal record and can't get hired anywhere else. Emily takes the credit card to an electronics store, buys an oversized TV as instructed, and delivers it to a warehouse. They hand her two $100 bills and that's it, as far as her involvement.

The stolen items are subsequently fenced, or returned to another electronics store for a gift card maybe, which to these penny-ante criminals is almost as good as cash.

After this first run, Emily gets pulled in deeper by Youcef (Theo Rossi -- it's funny that the two "Arabic" guys are played by men of Italian and Jewish descent, but that's Hollywood), one of two brothers running this particular fraud ring. Maybe she understands that the real action is one or two steps higher in the chain -- why should she risk arrest using a fraudulent credit card, when she could be the shadowy ringleader who never goes on the street? Or maybe she's grateful that Youcef is willing to mentor her in his criminal enterprise, and that he has a charming little boy, and that he's attractive.

To reach this higher level, Emily undergoes a quest of sorts. She has to toughen up emotionally, think like a criminal and not a civilian, and with the aid of a stun gun and a newfound capacity to stand up to men who try to rip her off or intimidate her, she goes to the dark side. But! -- there's always a complication, it's Hollywood after all -- when Youcef's brother Khalil discovers their relationship, he turns on Youcef, ripping off not only Youcef's (and Emily's) stash of stolen goods but enptying the bank account he shared with his brother.

Then, because he's really just another loser, Youcef caves in emotionally -- his big brother's been bullying him his whole life and this is just another time when he has to eat shit. Disgusted, Emily straightens him up and they execute a raid on Khalil's house. But, of course, that gets complicated too.

Aubrey Plaza really shows talent here in a non-comedic role. Here, her deadpan stare means something other than alienation or sarcasm. It communicates desperation, overlaid with now-accessible anger and a new-found determination not to be fucked with. Emily the criminal is stronger than Emily the catering worker. It's no wonder where she finds herself at the end of the story: having escaped Los Angeles, she starts a credit card fraud ring of her own.

What I really liked about this movie -- aside from the sheer pleasure of watching Plaza, who is becoming a must-watch actor the way Elizabeth Moss or Scarlett Johannson or Greta Gerwig have become (significantly, all of these actors have become producers of their own work, seizing control of the means of production) -- is the way it brings to very realistic life the shabby, scrabbling, dirtbag side of Los Angeles, where everyone except the kingpins drive dented gray Toyotas and live in one-star apartment complexes the police visit every weekend. When they go to raid Khalil, they don't go to one of these shitholes, but to Khalil's small mansion with new SUVs in the driveway. Now we're talking.

That the mansion is evidently rented doesn't matter. They're all living on credit anyway -- in this case, always someone else's.