Kevin Costner is escorted to his salon appointment in CRIMINAL (Jack English/Lionsgate)

The memory of CIA agent Ryan Reynolds is implanted into the brain of hardened criminal Kevin Costner with the help of scientist Tommy Lee Jones. It sounds like a page out of Hollywood Mad Libs, but this is the premise for director Ariel Vromen’s ridiculous new thriller Criminal. Did I say ridiculous? I meant awesome.

Agent Bill Pope (Reynolds) is tortured to death in London by a Spanish anarchist (Jordi Mollà), who fails to get the agent to cough up the whereabouts of a Polish hacker known as The Dutchman (Michael Pitt). The Dutchman can infiltrate U.S. military computers and take command of the nation’s entire fleet of missiles, so naturally the CIA wants to get their hands on him too. But dead sources don’t talk. Or do they?

CIA’s London Chief Quaker Wells (Gary Oldman) happens to know that Dr. Franks (Jones) has developed a procedure that can transfer memory from one human to another. But who’s the lucky guinea pig? Dr. Franks happens to know a subject who, thanks to childhood abuse, has a rare brain condition that makes his frontal lobe particularly receptive to a memory implant. This subject is Jericho Stewart (Costner), a practically feral felon seemingly incapable of feeling emotions or knowing wrong from right.

The procedure doesn’t seem to work, and Jericho is sent back to prison, but for some reason this backwoods Hannibal Lecter is only restrained by the means of plastic cuffs, and he easily escapes. But who escapes: the hardened criminal or the CIA family man?

The script by Douglas Cook and David Weisberg is peppered with intentional humor, as when Jericho steals a delivery van and starts bobbing his head to the dub techno that its previous owners have left behind. But there are howlers, too. When Jericho tells Dr. Franks that the strange memories in his head make him into a better man. the doctor gently explains, “It’s called emotions.” When Wells orders heat-sensitive surveillance and barks out, “Get me thermals!” it’s easy to believe that Oldman is mentally ordering long underwear to wait out the cold and dreary winter of his career.

But if you can suspend disbelief and logical rigor, Criminal is a lot of fun. Here’s a sentence I did not expect to write in 2016: Kevin Costner turns in a credible performance. Jericho is a far-fetched character, but his internal conflict of juggling memories is essentially the daily job of actors. If the CIA agent’s memories make the criminal a better man, the felon’s brutality gives the CIA agent a relentless fury that he didn’t have before.

Criminal has plot holes you can drive a submarine through, but thanks to Costner’s (my own memory implant makes it difficult for me to write this) sensitive performance, the audience starts to root for its heroic villain, and may well cheer when he reaches for a weaponized cactus. There may even be some method to this action movie’s delirious silliness; as the villainous anarchist at one point blurts out in an obvious Tommy Wiseau impersonation, “You betrayed me!”

You’ve seen some version of Criminal before, in John Woo’s Face/Off or in last year’s widely panned Tarsem Singh joint Self/Less, which plants Ben Kingsley’s memory inside Ryan Reynolds’ brain for what seems to be the start of a mental daisy-chain that I hope ends with a talking animal movie. The Tomatometer currently lists Criminal at a measly 25 percent approval rating, and I can’t honestly say it’s a good movie. But I enjoyed the hell out of it, and it made me feel emotions.

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Criminal
Directed by Ariel Vromen
With Kevin Costner, Ryan Reynolds, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman, Gal Gadot
Written by Douglas Cook and David Weisberg
Rated R for strong violence and language throughout
113 minutes
Opens today at a multiplex near you