Criminal: Five Gears in Reverse

Ricky Lawless has a problem.  He’s seventy-five grand in the hole to a bookie named Karl, who wants him to pull off a simple job to make up for that.  Go to a hotel, wait for a high-stakes poker player to come back to his room, and then rob him.  It sounds straightforward, but whenever Ricky Lawless is involved in a job, it’s never a question of if things will go off without a hitch, but how badly they’ll go off the rails.  Which is how, after that night, he finds himself robbing an underworld cash dropoff, going on a trip up north to keep his girlfriend alive, trying to get a scumbag lawyer back to his boss with all of his body parts still attached, and attempting to take a hit out on the one man you don’t do that to.  It may sound crazy, but that’s Ricky’s life for you.

Writer Ed Brubaker describes this volume’s protagonist in his afterword as “Criminal’s” most tragic but entertaining character.  “Most tragic,” absolutely.  “Entertaining,” well… that’s a stretch by what we see here.  We got a good idea of who Ricky was back in the second volume, when his brother Tracy was trying to figure out how he died, and “Cruel Summer” (along with the one issue from that run of the series that has yet to be collected) told the story of how he wound up becoming such a self-destructive mess along the way.  If the point of “Five Gears in Reverse” was to show us what a job looks like whenever Ricky gets involved, then it’s honestly a miracle he survived as long as he did.

If that makes it sound like I didn’t care much for this story, then you’d be right.  Easily the least good “Criminal” story so far, it doesn’t really tell us anything about its main character that we didn’t already know or could guess.  Though there’s no denying that Brubaker’s well-oiled narrative skills and artist Sean Phillips’ stylishly off-kilter art make Ricky’s troubles go down smoothly, there’s also a disappointing predictability to the whole thing:  Just assume that nothing will go to plan because he’ll screw it up in some way.  This may be true to the spirit of the series, but it doesn’t feel like the right way forward for it after “The Knives” showed that a worthwhile future for it was possible.