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The Last Days of American Crime (2020)

How did someone named Olivier Megaton direct a boring film? 149 minutes of a bad movie is punishment enough. When the sentence is compounded by unlikeable characters, a half-baked future world, lousy acting, and dialogue that'll make you wince, be merciful; rather than subject us to “The Last Days of American Crime”, just put a bullet in our head.

In the future, the U.S. government is about to activate the American Peace Initiative (API), a signal that will prevent its citizens from committing acts they know are wrong. Professional bank robber Graham Bricke (Édgar Ramírez) is approached by Kevin Cash (Michael Pitt) and his fiancé Shelby Dupree (Anna Brewster). They plan on robbing Detroit’s Federal Reserve Treasury. The heist will take place just as the signal becomes online (the police will be turning in their weapons at this point). When it does, Shelby will sabotage the tower covering their area. Within 30 minutes, they'll be starting a new life of luxury in Canada.

This setup and plot are needlessly complicated. Bricke had a stash of money but it’s been stolen by a crime syndicate. He’s broke and mourning his brother's suicide, except he didn’t kill himself, he was murdered by prison guards. It's useless information. Was the story of a career criminal confronting the API not enough? We needed all this, and a love plot between him and Shelby (they have no chemistry whatsoever) behind Kevin’s back? And Kevin's revenge against his mafia family? And a subplot about a cop (Sharlto Copley as Officer William Sawyer) who doesn’t want to be part of the future police department, but then changes his mind? Too much stuff going on. Within 20 minutes, you’ve stopped caring.

The concept of a society in which crime is "going away” is interesting - if done right. We see protesters in the streets but we’re never told why. We can deduce that it’s because people are worried the signal - which freezes those about to do something wrong - will wreak havoc, combined with the fact that certain police officers will be made them immune to the signal. Why do they need immunity? To go… undercover? That won’t happen ever. In fact, the police will be so useless once the API is active they’re all about to be laid off - I guess traffic lights will never break down and they don’t plan on investigating crimes committed in the past. The freezing thing is what makes this entire premise fall apart. What if a pilot sneaks a candy bar from the snack cart? Is the entire flight going down? Other questions that should be answered aren’t, like what if someone see nothing wrong with driving through a red light at 3:00 am when the streets are deserted. I know I should just “go with it” but API isn’t necessary to the plot, not when you don’t discuss its moral implications. Compare this to Minority Report, for example.

Even if you could get over the excessive running time and the choppy worldbuilding, everything else is a mess. The dialogue sounds like it’s been written by a 13-year-old edgelord who read all of Sin City and thought “I can do better”. Everyone we meet is unlikable, even when screenplay writer Karl Gajdusek introduces a bunch of additional baddies to show us why Shelby is a victim, not a villain. The violence is too brutal to be fun (why is there an attempted rape in this movie?) and Megaton manages to make it all ugly and frequently incomprehensible. Or maybe it only seemed incoherent because I kept almost dozing off.

You can look as hard as you want. You won’t find anything good, creative, worthwhile, or even “ok” in The Last Days of American Crime. It almost hints at interesting ideas but the apparent paradoxes in its world seem more unintentional goofs than commentary. It’s a contender for the worst movie of 2020. (April 27, 2021)