"Emily the Criminal" 

The subtle action of writer/director John Patton Ford’s feature film debut may make “Emily the Criminal” the most exciting crime film you’ll ever see, but it includes some stunningly realistic performances that make it worth the watch.

Newcomer Ford crafts a bleak image in his protagonist role of what it feels like to be a 30-something struggling to get by. Working against her is five-figure student loan debt and a prior conviction that makes it nearly impossible to find a job that pays well enough to help with that mountain of financial stress.

Aubrey Plaza stars as Emily, the down-on-her-luck millennial in question in one of her finest performances and the most starkly different character that we’ve seen from her. She sheds that dark and twisty persona we’ve come to know and love, and slithers into this grounded anti-heroine.

Hustling through her days as a contracted driver for a catering company in Los Angeles, Emily is on the lookout for a new, better-paying job. But she’s got a previous assault charge on her record that keeps her from securing more gainful employment.

With a chip on her shoulder, she continues to deliver lunches to corporate offices until her co-worker shares an opportunity to make $200 in cash for an hour of work. So she shows up at a seedy-looking dry cleaner/office space to find a collective of other people just like her who have gathered for similar reasons — to make some quick and easy money. There the cool talking and kindly Youcef (Theo Rossi) informs them all of the task at hand: dummy shopping. The job is relatively simple, take a stolen credit card number and use it to purchase a big ticket item like a TV then sell the essentially stolen item to someone else and pocket the cash. While it’s not dangerous, it is certainly illegal.

So, Emily does it, and with Youcef, being a little smitten with her style offers, her another job the next day for $2,000.

Hesitantly, she accepts and then she’s hooked on this seemingly easy way to make some cash, so she starts her own small operation with Youcef’s help. But soon Emily will discover the job is trickier than she expects.

While the criminality behind Emily isn’t the most exciting or action-driven on the list of scheming films out there, it is certainly more believable than many. The small-time crimes highlighted feel more realistic and therefore we have more connection to Emily and her plights and see how far her anger for the world that has put her in this position will take her.

Plaza and Rossi are well cast against each other and both highlight the realism of the overall film in their performance. Given that this film focuses on a smaller felony and not something that necessarily requires big, sweeping emotional swings or overblown, melodrama, their rootedness works to the film’s advantage.

It is especially nice to see Plaza stretch her acting chops in a straight-up drama and do it as well as she does. Emily’s character arc is all about her self-empowerment and how the system around her is inherently broken and therefore her choice, while not the one the majority of the world would take, never seems out of the realm of possibility.

For the sake of realism, the climax isn’t incredibly heightened or over the top, but because it’s kept realistic, it lacks an exciting conclusion. That’s not to say that there are not a couple of moments throughout where you are left with a heart rate-increasing scene, but nothing to send you too far to the edge of your seat.

And that is where the film does falter, it limits itself to this almost hyper-realism but that doesn’t exactly make it exciting to watch. The bare-bones script, while well written, leaves little to remember of the actual story but luckily with Plaza and Rossi we do at least have arresting performances to keep us watching.

On screens this week: The Idris Elba starring adventure-thriller “Beast” chomps its way into theaters and “Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero” will screen with both dubbed and subbed. On the streaming side, horror prequel “Orphan: First Kill” drops on Paramount+ and the “Game of Thrones” prequel series “House of the Dragon” premiers Sunday on HBO Max and will air new episodes weekly.

“Emily the Criminal”

93 minutes

Rated R for language, some violence and brief drug use.

3 stars