Review of Emily the Criminal, directed by John Patton

One day, I was really bored and had nothing else to do (spoiler: there were things I could have been doing, but chose not to do), and so I turned to Netflix.

A favorite hobby of mine has been to watch movies I would have never seen if I weren’t bored, and there have been some surprising entries as of late that I’ve actually enjoyed. I have a tendency to stick to international cinema, as those who follow this blog have noticed throughout the past two years I’ve been around, but this has forced me to watch more English-language works.

Anyways, I saw that Emily the Criminal was added to Netflix around the time I was really bored, so I ended up pressing play. This wasn’t a movie I could watch in one sitting (I was not a fan, but I powered through y’all, so I ended up cranking through the entire thing in two separate sittings days apart.

I usually give up on movies when I get to that point, but something about this movie kept me going. Maybe because I sympathized with Emily and how she ended up in the situation she did.

Enough rambling! Let’s get on with the review.

Emily, who lives in Los Angeles, is forced to join a crime ring out of desperation. She needs money.

Living in Los Angeles, Emily is desperate for work. She’s deep in debt, like so many of us Americans nowadays, and if she doesn’t get a good income coming her way soon, things aren’t looking too hot for her. The relatable part of all of this? Her debt comes from student loans.

She couldn’t even get a good-paying job despite going to school because she landed a felony conviction while attending, which not only has impacted her employment, but also her school. She had to drop out of school because of it, too.

After joining a food delivery service, Emily is recommended to join a different kind of work. When she shows up to the recruitment meeting, she discovers it’s actually a credit card fraud ring. One of her first gigs given by Youcef, one of the men running this operation, is to buy a television with a fake card. She does that, and she’s then given a bigger gig to buy a car from a man. But in the middle of that mission, the guy realizes what’s she doing, and comes after her.

Emily ends up pepper spraying him to get away, after a bit of a car chase on the narrow side streets of Los Angeles. Because of how she ends up injured doing this, she becomes enraged with those leading the operation, and kind of storms away with the intent of never returning to this line of business.

At the same time, her friend who works for an advertising company promises her that a job might be opening up soon, which raises Emily’s hopes that she can get honest work soon.

She continues with the fraud ring. When dogsitting one night, a buyer for the stolen goods shows up to her house and robs her, taking the dog in the process, and Emily begins to show how she’s changing. She chases after the guy and tasers him, taking the money she has and the dog back. This is the first sign she is succumbing to her circumstances. After being invited to a work party by her friend at the advertising company, she brings her boss Youcef, and the two begin to be romantically involved.

As it turns out later, the job that opened up at the company is an unpaid internship. Emily is enraged at the meeting with the boss, and the boss calls her spoiled because she wants to be paid for her work. Emily, in turn, basically calls this exploitation and leaves after angrily rebuffing the woman.

Things are starting to spiral, as Emily was also caught in security footage taken by a store she helped rob. It’s now online, so people know what she looks like.

The nail in the coffin is when Youcef reveals his cousin hasn’t been paying him for months. Together, Emily and he decide to ambush him, and Youcef is wounded with a knife in the process.

Emily manages to stop the cousin, Khalil, and takes the money back, but while she’s taking the bleeding Youcef back to the car, she realizes the situation has changed in her favor. With the cops closing in, she decides to take the money and flee. The police later raid her house, but she flees to Latin America, living a life on the beach and starting her own fraud ring.

Overall Thoughts

This wasn’t too compelling of a movie—I think for this movie to work in the way it unfolds, you really need a magnetic female lead that makes you sympathize with her, but Emily isn’t exactly relatable outside the fact she’s deep in debt.

There’s commentary about this and how she’s forced into a life of crime by the circumstances that have forced her hand, but when I actually thought about it, she’s mostly hurting people like herself.

Small business owners and people who are barely getting by when owning businesses, which most likely are run by immigrants in Los Angeles. That’s a different kind of cycle—I remember when my family’s restaurant was a victim of credit card fraud, they had to lose the money for the differences.

The credit companies wouldn’t cover it. I think I come into this kind of movie with this perspective, which makes me think that the main character isn’t the greatest despite all of that. The commentary just wasn’t it for me in the end.

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