Based on Rick Remender and Greg Tocchini’s comic book, and directed by Olivier Megaton, Netflix’s The Last Days of American Crime follows three criminals (played by Edgar Ramirez, Anna Brewster, and Michael Pitt) as they carry out a heist — and escape to Canada — before the government turns on a signal that stops anyone from committing an act they believe is illegal. It is an utterly turgid and tedious film.
Gruelingly long at two-and-a-half hours, and relentlessly violent, Last Days feels like an exercise in how to completely suck out the joy from an amusing concept: it’s humorless and pretentious, yet unaware of how absurd it is, compounding the frustration that settles in during the first 20 minutes. The film’s stupidity is epitomized early on, when trying to establish its Sodom and Gomorrah-esque version of the States: Ramírez’s Graham Bricke walks down the street, and observes two men fighting, and a topless woman dancing on a car — yes, it’s crass and gratuitous, but it’s apt illustration of how unimaginative the film is, rather than its setting.
For the record, this would’ve been a bad film whenever when it was released, but in the wake of the global protests caused by George Floyd’s murder, which have highlighted how much establishment corruption is the true problem, it feels even more uninspired. There is a concession to genuine social commentary when a broker tells Bricke he primarily funds white collar criminals, but overall, when watching the film, your mind can’t help but wander and daydream about how compelling this would’ve been if the leads were stealing money to pay for healthcare, or something as noble.
Despite its surprisingly small cast, the movie struggles to flesh out its characters beyond hard-boiled stereotypes, with attempts at sympathetic backstories that ultimately feel perfunctory — or in the case of Michael Pitt’s Kevin Cash, so unpleasant you’re not sure if it was meant to be funny or not. (It’s like the plot of a porno.) Ramirez appears as sullen and disinterested as we are, while Pitt is clearly having fun, but his character remains unlikable. Brewster tries her best as Shelby Dupree, as inconsistent as her accent is, but she’s still saddled with bad dialogue, and an adolescent notion of what a strong, sexually independent woman is like.
Her character’s storyline sees her have sex in a grotty toilet; slapped by FBI agents; almost raped; and forced to kill a man — it plays like a sadomasochistic vision of what a strong female character should endure to be worth our time. Sharlto Copley is also in this as one of those fabled good cops, and he is simultaneously wasted and unnecessary, his limited screentime rendering him lost amidst the bloated runtime. The movie does not know what it wants to do with his character, who’s days away from retirement because of the signal: is he a foil to our anti-heroes? A misguided antagonist? This movie may be paced like an arthouse film, but it eventually just shrugs its shoulders, jumps off its soapbox, and runs away.
Honorable thieves or not, the movie could’ve overcome its length if it were entertaining, but it mistakes profanity for witty banter, and the guitar-based score is banal, adding to the growing irritation. The action, when it finally unfolds, decides gunfire and speeding cars are exciting enough (it’s not), while the orange-saturated Bay/Bruckheimer-style cinematography is an old-fashioned eyesore. The movie is not interested in being in social commentary, or a stylish heist caper: at least a good half-hour to an hour dealing with the gang’s enemies could’ve been cut.
During the last hour (I think), the movie does start to interrogate its implausible conceit, but it comes too late: you’ll start thinking about superior sci-fi crime films like The Matrix or Inception, which spend their entire runtimes examining the possibilities and pitfalls of their high concepts — which raises the question, why does this barely action-packed film not focus on the scientists devising this naive solution to crime? Whatever Last Days wants to be — a topical thriller, a slick crime flick, or science fiction — it utterly fails.
This movie is an embarrassment: it’s shameful that Netflix effectively canceled superior TV shows to complete this project. It’s just as well they buried it on release, but if only they had interfered creatively (and put the deleted scenes in another menu à la the trailers on the site), they might’ve salvaged this, instead of allowing it to become the waste of bandwidth space it is. Give this the thumbs down if you do see it appear in your recommendations.
