Emily the Criminal

 Emily the Criminal is a vehicle for Aubrey Plaza, one of the more interesting actors to emerge from the crucible of talent that was the TV show Parks and Recreation.  (Nick Offerman and Chris Platt are also alumni of the show.)  In Parks and Recreation, Aubrey Plaza played April Ludgate, a sullen, pouting Goth girl who seemed to regard every aspect of her work (and her interactions with fellow employees in the Parks and Rec department) as a personal affront.  She plays a more grown-up, sinister variation on this disgruntled character in Emily the Criminal, a 2022 Netflix movie (directed by John Patton Ford).  Plaza is hardwired into the Zeitgeist as I write in December 2022 -- she has just impressed critics with her performance in HBO's The White Lotus (Season 2).

Emily the Criminal is a small, somewhat nondescript but compelling, parable.  The title character is first shown to us in close-up, sullenly evading questions in a job interview.  (She seems to have dropped out of college and has a felony assault on her record).  When Emily perceives that the interviewer knows the answers to the questions that he is posing so as to trick her into lying, she curses him and stalks outs of his office. (This scene wins us over to Emily's side in the film's first three minutes.)  It seems that she is seeking better employment than the part-time catering job that we see her doing -- she rushes around the city with trays of hot food, apparently for something less than minimum wage.  A co-worker suggests that she earn a quick $200 as a "dummy shopper".  She goes to meeting with about a dozen other underemployed people who are recruited by a Lebanese criminal named Youcef.  After warning his recruits that they are being retained to commit crimes, Youcef hands out bogus credit cards to those who are game for the scam.  Emily uses a fake credit card to buy a big-screen TV that she delivers to Youcef.  He is impressed by her nonchalance and aplomb and offers her a more lucrative gig.  For a $2000 fee, Emily uses a "black" no-limits credit card, also fake of course, to buy a car.  The transaction goes awry and the Lebanese thugs who are selling the car (presumably stolen) try to beat-up Emily.  She fights back with Pepper Spray and, then, escapes with the car evading the Armenians who pursue her in a high-speed chase.  Bloody and dazed, she delivers the car to Youcef, denouncing him for putting her in danger -- "if it was so simple, why didn't you do it yourself?" she asks Youcef and his partner Khalil. Youcef tends to her wounds and encourages her to use a dozen or so fake credit cards to buy other goods.  Emily, perhaps, not surprisingly, is a whiz at crime and she makes a lot of money for Youcef.  But she is taking too much time off her catering job and her boss fires her.  When she protests, he says that she's just an "independent contractor" and,  if she doesn't like being fired, she can see her "union steward" -- of course, there is no union and no steward and the film's political implications are pretty clear:  a fundamentally unfair work place drives people to crime.  Emily also is encouraged to apply for a job at the advertising agency where her glamorous and successful friend works -- both young women hail from Newark, New Jersey, although the movie is set in LA.  While Emily is babysitting her glamorous friend's dog (she is on "shoot" in Portugal), some other small-time criminals, tipped off the heroine's moonlighting as a thief, beat her up, take her money, and, as an additional insult, dog-nap the dachshund that she is watching for her friend.  This last indignity pushes Emily over the edge.  She takes a taser, walks up to the pick-up where her assailants are gloating about robbing her, and mercilessly electrocutes the thug.  She throws his girlfriend on the pavement and uses a box-cutter to threaten to cut her throat.  The girl surrenders the money and Emily takes the dog back to her grubby apartment leaving the two would-be robbers disabled and sprawling on the asphalt.  Emily falls deeper and deeper into penny-ante property crimes but, suddenly, a way out of poverty offers itself -- she interviews with her glamorous friend's boss at the ad agency, an elegant attractive bitch played by Gina Gershon.  The boss, who hails from Hoboken, offers her an unpaid internship for six months which Emily rejects with profane indignation.  By this time, the heroine is sleeping with Youcef.  Youcef, who plays the role of an Arab-speaking Fagin in this Dickensian plot, gets into a quarrel with his cousin, Khalil.  Emily and Youcef plan to rob Khalil, but he beats them to the punch, stealing all of Youcef's ill-gotten money.  Youcef has qualms about the situation and seems to accept the loss as one of the fortunes of war.  Not Emily.  With Youcef, she raids Khalil's townhouse, tasing his bodyguards into unconsciousness, and savagely beating Khalil.  She forces Khalil to surrender his fortune in stolen money.  In the havoc, Youcef has been severely injured, stabbed in the thigh and he is bleeding out.  Emily calls for an ambulance, says good bye to her unconscious boyfriend, and flees with Khalil's stash of cash.  We next see her in some seaside resort town in Mexico, apparently, well-heeled and recruiting poor gig-economy workers for a "dummy shopper" scheme.  

The movie's point is questionable:  Emily is forced into criminality by an economy that has no reasonable jobs for her to perform.  But the movie is fair-minded and not as simplistic as this summary would suggest.  At the outset, we learn that Emily has a history of violent crime.  And, in fact, it seems that she has a  vocation for felonies.  It's not clear, accordingly, whether her poor economic prospects are the cause of her descent into crime or whether she is somehow predisposed to such activities -- she turns out to be a very skillful and aggressive criminal.  At one point, Youcef takes Emily to meet his mother, a profane old woman who seems a little shady herself.  The old woman tells Emily that her whole life is ahead of her and that, in the proper circumstances, she could be "Emily the mother" or Emily the teacher."  It doesn't exactly occur to her that Emily's best and highest vocation is to be "Emily the Criminal".  

Emily the Criminal is shot efficiently, with an invisible style -- it's classic new Hollywood in the way that scenes are set up and managed, lots of closeups and jerky handheld camera, everything scrupulously realistic.  Some of the robberies are very suspenseful.  The movie succeeds because of its star -- Aubrey Plaza is alternatively vulnerable and viciously aggressive:  the film uses the time-honored gimmick of getting the audience to identify with its criminal protagonist.  There's a nasty guilty pleasure in watching Emily savage her enemies -- we're on her side even when she's engaging in torture.  The politically "woke" elements of the script are window-dressing but they are convincing -- if people want  you to work for free, what's a girl to do?