Starring Kevin Costner. Rated 14A

If you’re wondering where the ’90s went, it’s here, mostly enfeebled. We say “mostly” because Kevin Costner is actually quite good in his role as Jericho Stewart, a psychopath with the emotional gestalt of a four-year-old. (His daddy threw him out of a car as a child, so now he’s a feral genius given the sci-fi maximum-security Hannibal Lecter treatment.) An amusing, if shockingly frail-looking, Tommy Lee Jones is the CIA scientist (Dr. Franks, geddit?) who “repatterns” Jericho’s brain with Ryan Reynolds’s memories, the latter returning from Deadpool to his customary role as box-office poison before getting snuffed in the first five minutes.

In a small concession to realism, Franks argues in favour of experimenting on and then employing a conscience-free killing machine to do the agency’s work. Station chief Gary Oldman isn’t so sure, and phones in a performance to let us know. Costner is out there trying to find a bag of money and save the world from an antiglobalist “anarchist” bent on hacking America’s all-important defence shield, all while suffering pangs of humanity thanks to another man’s consciousness.

It’s all handled competently enough, but Costner deserves a better script for his gruffly witty performance, which quotes rather explicitly from Frankenstein as it goes along. (He’s even got Boris Karloff’s art-deco haircut from 1934’s The Black Cat.)

Behind the scenes, the three stars of this film might have reminisced a little sadly about the time they all made JFK together. Meanwhile, we can ponder who’s actually being repatterned around here, as Hollywood slimily insists once again that a grotesque concentration of global wealth and power is something worth protecting. That really is criminal.