Movie Review : The Last Days of American Crime (2020)
Earlier this month, Netflix started mysteriously carpet bombing their promotion outlets for a movie no one was exactly expecting or ever heard of: Facebook, newsletter, pre-roll ads, you name it. They went hard. Netflix are no strangers to idiotic catalog filler, but they seemed adamant that I (along with any human being with a pulse) would love it. I have no idea why, but it’s how they goaded me into watch The Last Days of American Crime.
Long story short, the movie started with a whopping 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and it worked hard at it.
The premise of The Last Days of American Crime is a disaster in itself: Forty-eight hours before the government activates a neural signal to neutralize criminal behavior in the United States, career bank robber Bricke (Edgar Ramirez) is solicited by a mysterious woman (Anna Brewster) and his archenemy’s son (Michael Pitt) for the biggest score in his career. Of course, nothing will be simple and double-crossing assholes will wait for him at every turn.
That’s it. It’s not that far from a classic heist movie premise, right? Let’s start with the obvious: scrambling the brain of anyone tempted to cross legal boundaries sounds is a piss poor solution to criminality. Repression doesn’t work even when it involves mind control, especially the neural signal in The Last Days of American Crime: it doesn’t brain wash you into becoming nice, it prevents you from doing crime by transforming you into a human pancake for 30 seconds.
People are going to get pissed, find loopholes and work within the boundaries to change these fucking boundaries. Also, who the fuck’s been a career bank robber past 1990?
The movie is also a tonal mess. I don’t mind weird bubblegum ultraviolence, but the characters need to behave accordingly. Bricke is such a self-serious, brooding jerkoff that he doesn’t really fit the mood. When Shelby’s character is introduced, he starts a monologue about women to live for and women to die for, makes small talk with her, takes her to the bathroom for quick, hot sex and guess what? They didn’t even fucking know each other.
Newsflash: you don’t know if someone is to live for or die for within 30 seconds of meeting that person. Only emotionally unstable people think that way and not the endearing kind. If you’re going for bubblegum aesthetics, bring me the real crazy unbelievable characters. I want my protagonist to be called Tank McKiller and walk around with a chainsaw. Only things Graham Bricke walks around are a scowl and a stereotypical dead little brother grudge.
Did I mention The Last Days of American Crime is two and a half hours long? Not for the right reasons either. There’s a scene where Bricke and Kevin have to retrieve warheads from the Dumois compound and it takes them foreeever. Fifteen minutes in, they didn’t even start discussing the warheads yet. Director Olivier Megaton and screenwriter Karl Gadjusek use it to dump WAY too much info on Kevin including a mobbed up sister who is a waste of screenplay.
It’s not even a movie that’s long because it is complex. It is long because it is full of characters and scene that aren’t useful to the narrative and that could’ve been cut.
I’ve been on a streak of bad movies. The Last Days of American Crime is not the worst thing I’ve ever seen: it’s not technically incompetent an it’s not vile or exploitative. It’s one of these movies where you feel like the creative minds behind it wanted to do something big and bold and had no fucking idea what it would be. It’s a slick-looking, incongruous hodgepodge mix of people trying WAY too hard to look cool or dangerous, the way 14 year olds do.
1.6/10
