Emily The Criminal (2022) At this moment in time, until she breaks out of the public persona she's so carefully cultivated, this film now stands as the quintessential Aubrey Plaza movie........
A modestly produced but nevertheless riveting thriller, it more than confirms what anyone can detect in Plaza's withering, deadpan sarcastic performances.....(both on film, TV and talk shows)
.......that underneath her blank, dead-eyed snark, there's a seething, bubbling rage, ready to show itself at a moment's notice.
"Emily The Criminal", which Plaza co-produced, seems specifically designed not only as a showcase for her "smartest, most subtle mother****** in the room" image but as an outlet for her inner killer to come out and play.
And it's a sight you cannot look away from.
Plaza's Emily is a millennial whose youthful missteps (a DUI and and an assault charge) have left her toxic to mainstream employers. The constant rejections barely keep her hair-trigger temper at bay; her job interviews, where a resentful Emily is confronted with her bad choices, invariably turn combative and ugly in a hurry. Saddled with punishing student loan debt, she's reduced to life in minimum wage service industry hell, delivering food orders to offices.
A co-worker's tip leads her to a quick-cash scam operation run by Lebanese immigrant, Yousef (Theo Rossi) - which requires a nervy, fake 'shopper to purchase big ticket items with stolen credit card numbers for later resale by Yousef on the black market.
Emily, to both her own surprise and ours, comes to fully embrace her new illegal lifestyle, becoming Yousef's most productive, profit-making 'dummy shopper'. Predictably, some of her thefts go south, with her victims exacting violent payback on her. But Emily, also drawing on her newly discovered supply of rage, picks herself right up off the floor and strikes back with a vengeance.
Plaza seizes this role as if she was waiting her entire life for it, at long last finding a story and character worthy of her unflinching, wide-eyed glare.
Given the gritty, painful realism of the bulk of the film the fate dished out to Emily at first struck me as a little too neat, tidy and self-congratulatory. But thinking about it now, it's a perfect conclusion, a witty, slap-in-the-face summing up of the warped morality of the current world we all live in.
Unlike every other soul on the internet, I've yet to come up with any kind of "Best Movies Of 2022" list......but as long as we're on the subject, I'll place "Emily The Criminal" among my 10 best of the year. A 4 star (****) must-see for all cinema lovers.
(And keep a close watch on your credit cards.......and enjoy the holidays!)
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