Crypto,  is an indie film starring KURT RUSSELL. It’s about money laundering, and mentions Bitcoin a bunch. Also, it has KURT RUSSELL.

The crypto bubble peaked in 2017, but movies take time. Crypto ‘s original script was written in 2017 and sent to the director, John Stalberg Jr., in early 2018. Stalberg sorted out the production deals by mid-2018, and the film was finally released to video-on-demand, and “select theaters,” in the US on Friday. You gotta work faster than that for good cryptosploitation.

Our Hero (who is not  KURT RUSSELL) is a bank compliance officer. His name is Marty, and he’s played by Beau Knapp, but actor and even character names don’t really matter here—everyone’s a generic type.

Marty is fighting the good fight against money laundering. He’s functionally a cop, doing a humorless and antisocial version of Columbo. He is exiled to his home town in upstate New York for being too good  at his job on Wall Street, and swoops into town to make everyone miserable in the pursuit of justice.

Things start with KURT RUSSELL being handed over to Marty by kidnappers. KURT doesn’t show up again for another hour. Sorry, fans.

The film’s logotype is “CЯYPTO,” with a backwards R. This is to telegraph early that the bad guys are … Russkies!  The accountant runs burner phone numbers by swapping SIMs by hand—as if every phone doesn’t also send its IMEI—and you can tell he’s a bad guy by the phone interface coming up in … Russian! 

The movie starts off promising us a financial police procedural, maybe even something cerebral. Then it tries to turn into an action thriller—at least, it throws out the signifiers of an action thriller—but it fails to deliver any thrills.

SPOILER ALERT: The good guys win! The FBI swoops in and arrests everyone, including the rich bad guys. So, it’s definitely fiction since in real life it would be the SEC just creating confusion.

Curiously, for a movie called Crypto , actual cryptocurrencies barely feature. The main money laundering isn’t happening via cryptos at all.

The Bitcoin ATM scene in the liquor store is technically inaccurate, but socially spot-on: a normal person accidentally tries to use a supposed “Bitcoin ATM” to get out real money, and is preached at by the owner—Marty’s high school buddy, Bitcoin Bro, whose name I learned in IMDb, is actually “Earl.” Out the back of the store, Bitcoin Bro/Earl  is running mining rigs (at upstate New York electricity prices?) and daytrading ICO shitcoins.

I laughed out loud twice at Bitcoin Bro evangelizing crypto at Marty in the bar.

Marty: “Do you really believe this shit, or are you just bored out of your mind?”

Earl: “Are those two things mutually exclusive?”

The pacing is paralyzingly slow—it takes two-thirds of the movie for the plot to get going. (You can bet I kept checking how many minutes in we were.) Every plot beat is telegraphed, and each beat gets ever more thuddingly unsubtle as the story progresses.

The soundtrack overdoes the ominous whooshing  noises to signify that stuff is happening—it’s unclear precisely what the financial shenanigans are, so the film has to tell you a given plot point is significant by the ominous whooshing .

The actors are better than the film. Did I mention KURT RUSSELL enough yet? KURT RUSSELL! He can do whatever he feels like, and he likely just decided this’d be a fun project. And he acts the hell out of his small part in this mediocre story.

If you watch Crypto  for KURT RUSSELL, his few minutes here and there—playing a completely passive MacGuffin that happens to talk—will completely deliver. Lead actor Beau Knapp is also surprisingly good, delivering his dumb lines well. Alexis Bledel as Movie Poster Female Lead is fine, but barely interacts with the story. And Jeremie Harris does great as Earl the Bitcoin Bro, and gets a lot more actual plot—but they left him almost entirely out of the publicity, which is a shame.

The cinematography is excellent—every shot looks the part. Mostly in the dark—even the daytime scenes are dark—but that’s fine. This film looks  good.

The dialogue though is overly processed, extruded Hollywood script product, and never mind the audible strain on some of the actors as they try to deliver these bad sentences smoothly. The sound is muffled, to the point they had to resort to using muffled dialogue in the trailer. The denouement line of the film itself is barely intelligible. This was sloppy.

Crypto  is not an individual vision straining to reach the screen, destined for cult hipness. It’s as spontaneous as a color-by-numbers picture. It’s not awful,  exactly, because it’s running on rails. But at no point does it have the freedom to be great, despite the good to excellent acting.

So, is Crypto  good news for Bitcoin? The general populace will probably  still remember that “bitcoin” thing that happened a year or two ago—but most people will likely not even know that this film exists. (The crypto crowd will just sigh, “Used incorrect key-generation procedure, misspells ‘Merkle.’ 6.537 out of 10.”)

But it’s the B-movie it knows it is, and doesn’t offend the sensibilities. You can watch it at home drinking with friends, and say, “what the hell?” and “what just happened?” together at the dialogue and plot holes.

Once, anyway.

I’d rate it a 3.5 out of 5 Bitcoins—or would, if that meant anything.