One of contemporary cinema’s great moments in tone-deaf screenwriting unfolds in “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” when Keira Knightley gives a rousing speech about free men fighting for freedom to a pirate crew. Pirates, for those in need of a history lesson, generally exercised their freedom with murder, rape, and theft, so yes, free men they might be, but they’re also scumbags, something that the movie and its authors never consider. Olivier Megaton commits the same sin in his latest, “The Last Days of American Crime,” a film that should be ignored, not because discretion is the better part of valor but because it’s a steaming pile of garbage.
Movies can’t always choose their moment, and now is a very, very bad time for “The Last Days of American Crime” to premiere. But frankly, there isn’t any good moment for this film, either. Trends come and go, genres fade in and out of favor, but bad taste remains constant. And this film is in the absolute worst taste both aesthetically and ideologically. A movie about police violence that fails to grasp the depth of police violence as a threat to a peaceful egalitarian society would be unwelcome even in happier times. In the cultural moment the U.S. is having right now, where citizens are regularly taking to the streets in large numbers to protest the violence and racism perpetrated by the same people who vow to “protect and serve,” it’s anathema.
In Future America, the government has devised a technological whatsit to broadcast the API signal (American Peace Initiative) across the U.S. and instantly brain-scramble any schmuck thinking about doing crimes. The movie picks up the week before the API goes live, and the streets are teeming with random acts of violence and car-top stripteases. Megaton doesn’t bother clarifying the chicken-egg conundrum; either the API is a last-ditch cure-all for a country where people beat the shit out of each other and shake their tits in public, or people are beating the shit out of each other and shaking their tits in public because soon they won’t be able to, and they might as well have their fun while they can. It’s a bonkers scenario however “The Last Days of American Crime” justifies it, though of course, it doesn’t justify it at all.
Into the drama saunters hunky thief Graham Bricke (Édgar Ramírez), whose heisting days are coming to an end and whose brother is said to have committed suicide in prison but actually took a fatal beating from a guard. Graham links up with hacker-cum-shameless sex fantasy Shelby (Anna Brewster) and chatterbox gangster Kevin (Michael Pitt), who want to recruit him for the classic one last score and help him avenge his brother at the same time. What passes as a plot in “The Last Days of American Crime” hangs on their interactions, which go nowhere for the first 90 minutes and don’t add up to much else in the final 40. Megaton is fixated on the API at a surface level: Neither he nor screenwriter Karl Gajdusek have any real insight on the implications state-sanctioned mind control would have for democracy and care only about its impact on career criminals. (“The Last Days of American Crime” does halfheartedly suggest that the true crooks are bankers and financiers, but this thread feels like it’s introduced only in the interest of a self-satisfactory cheap shot.)
Think of the API as PreCrime from “Minority Report” cross-pollinated with Prozium II from “Equilibrium,” except badly thought out and infinitely stupider. Let the record also show that Megaton is neither Steven Spielberg (as so few people are) nor Kurt Wimmer, and lacks the former’s directorial mastery as well as the latter’s style, either of which would offset the inherent silliness of the film’s premise. Megaton doesn’t know what to do with his actors, either, and by consequence, they have no idea what to do with themselves. Ramírez stands motionless, arms crossed, stone-faced, brooding sans purpose; Brewster vamps, weaponizing Shelby’s sexuality only in pursuit of establishing a stock relationship with Graham; Pitt channels stoner, slacker Jason Mewes, a presence so grating that Ramírez’s dull smoldering is preferable by comparison. Everyone reads like they’re playing dress-up in their parents’ old clothes instead of just acting, and at no point does anything take place that looks like direction, much less editing or writing. The movie’s a gallimaufry cobbled together from pieces of better movies.
From top to bottom, “The Last Days of American Crime” is a lumbering referential malfunction. Nothing about it works; everything about it is offensive. But Megaton’s worst offense is his indulgence. “The Last Days of American Crime” clocks in at 149 minutes, an hour less than Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” and yet twice as long to endure all the same. It takes effort to make a movie drag this hard, but Megaton finds a way to fill the space between cuts, dialogue, and scene transitions with dimwitted oblivion, padding a story that only deserves an hour and change of screentime. May this be the last time he’s allowed to commit a crime this outrageous. [F]
“The Last Days of American Crime” is available to stream now on Netflix.