Crypto

Martin Duran (Beau Knapp) is an auditor at OmniBank, a prestigious New York bank, who infuriates the bank's president by questioning the accounting practices of a major potential client and so gets demoted to their branch bank in the farming community of Elba, New York, where he grew up. There he not only must contend with the animosity of the townspeople, who view him as an outsider, but he also must try to reconnect with his estranged family--his father (Kurt Russell), a stubborn potato farmer facing foreclosure, and his brother Caleb (Luke Hemsworth), a damaged Iraq War veteran.

In auditing the books of Endelman Gallery, a client of the Omni branch, he notices accounting peculiarities, and with the help of his boyhood friend Earl (Jeremie Harris), now a local store owner who also is knowledgeable about cryptocurrencies and the Dark Web, he begins to suspect that the art gallery is laundering money through Bitcoin transactions.

As Martin delves further into Omni's relationship with the gallery, people he has interviewed start turning up dead He must find out who is behind the crime and alert authorities before the body count rises.

A solid, mostly well-acted drama, although its slow pacing and Knapp's one-note performance will put many viewers to sleep.

This movie is as relevant as your cryptocurrency is at the theaters.

Crypto (2019) is fairly standard DTV fare. The script tosses around a lot of buzz words about crypto currencies and money laundering. The plot involves money laundering, Russian mobsters, multi-million-dollar paintings that look as if they could have been mass-produced in a factory in Mexico alongside the paintings on velvet, murder, extortion, embezzlement, the dark web, kidnapping, and other nefarious activities, none of which makes much sense. The script offers a few clever lines of dialogue and a lot of well-worn tropes. Performances are often a bit wooden, but the camera is generally rock steady.

One problem is that financial audits, a significant element in the film, are simply not visually interesting. The Accountant made them more visual with Wolff (Ben Affleck) scrawling numbers all over the conference room windows. Lone Star made Sam's (Chris Cooper) research more interesting with cryptic notes about various people killed by Sheriff Wade (Kris Kristofferson). But this film takes a less creative approach.

The scene in Pulp Fiction in which Vincent Vega (John Travolta) injected heroin was visceral and a bit cringeworthy. A scene of drug use in Crypto shows how much talent it takes to film such a scene effectively.

The film is rated R, although it seems tame enough for primetime television. The violence is low-key. The one sex scene involves a woman wearing a brassiere that seems modest enough to wear at the beach without attracting notice.

Several scenes involving harvesting potatoes don't seem at all realistic, even to a city boy like myself. In one scene, Martin Senior (Kurt Russell) harrows a field which supposedly hasn't been harvested. He has a nice John Deere tractor, but can't afford even a simple potato harvester for a farm worth over a million dollars, which means it is probably over 400 acres. The potato stalks are missing. How they removed the stalks without harvesting the potatoes is the biggest mystery in the film. But three guys manage to harvest 400 acres of potatoes in an afternoon. The potatoes have no dirt clinging to them when they are harvested. It really looks as if somebody took a couple of sacks of potatoes and covered them with a little dirt in a freshly ploughed field. If harvesting potatoes is a significant plot element, producers really need to schedule production in the fall, rather than the spring.

Some of the minor roles are performed well and eclipse the major roles. Kudos to Jill Hennessy, Joseph Siprut, Malaya Rivera Drew (although major demerits for the bedroom scene), Marsha Dietlein, and Luke Hemsworth.

The film is watchable, but lends itself to multitasking. Without fight scenes (other than a television caliber shootout), chases, pyrotechnics or special effects, the film needs a strong script. This one seems a couple of re-writes short of completion.

Despite the unknown leading characters this is quite a decent thriller,with good acting and a constant eerie suspense, which is quite mesmerizing. Definitely better than the Imdb rating would suggest.

The story is simple. A young employee working for a big corporation discovers a money laundering scheme. Now unknown criminal forces are out to get him. Will he survive?

Although Kurt Russell only plays quite a small supporting role, his role stands out and his role is quite meaningful to the story. Acting in general, despite a lot of unknown actors, is quite good to my pleasant surprise.

Recommended for the fans of smart and eerie thrillers, who dont want to see flashy action scenes, but who value suspense and a dark, ominous mood above all else.

Any bad? It is a slow burning thriller. Nothing much happens at the start. Character development is more important than shocking action scenes. For those who dont like that, this probably will not be your cup of tea...

I was really hoping that this movie would be educational for many people but unfortunately it will paint a negative image for crypto in general...that crypto is used for shady purposes like drugs, prostitution, porn and money laundering. But the fact is that the total market cap of the entire crypto market at the moment (April 2019) is around $134 billion and the banks have been FINED since 2008 for an of $243 BILLION!!! The main problem is that majority of the people don't understand how the monetary system works and what is broken in our current system and what exactly crypto is trying to fix. Only if people could understand or educate themselves about it, poorly realized movies like these wouldn't fool us about crypto anymore!