The Last Days Of American Crime Review

In the near future, where a simple signal can now curtail any criminal activity, low-life criminal Graham Bricke (Édgar Ramírez) joins forces with gangster’s son Kevin Cash (Michael Pitt) and his hacker fiancée Shelby Dupree (Anna Brewster) to pull off a heist worth $30 billion before the high-pitched whine is broadcast.

If, say, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird represents one end of the cinematic scale — sensitive, human, recognisable — then The Last Days Of American Crime is its complete opposite. Directed by Olivier Megaton (more directors’ names should reflect their filmmaking style — Wes Symmetry?), it shows a similar disregard for subtlety in storytelling to his Transporter 3 and his Taken sequels, but doesn’t particularly deliver on the action front either. Instead, it serves up a mixture of thin characters, reheated hardboiled dialogue, Jerry Bruckheimer filters, questionable portrayals of women, bad guitar scoring, nonsensical plotting and run-of-the-mill set-pieces — and takes 148 minutes to do it.

Based on Rick Remender and Greg Tocchini’s graphic novel, the promising if suspect premise is built on a frequency that blocks the synapses, making it impossible for anyone to commit crime. This has seen riots taking place, with Americans taking a stance over their country being turned into a police state (if nothing else, The Last Days is unexpectedly topical in 2020). Into this melee steps small-time hood Graham Bricke (Édgar Ramírez, one note), perhaps cinema’s only badass to be called Graham, who is approached by slightly unhinged, Armani-clad gangster’s son Kevin Cash (Michael Pitt) and his femme fatale-alike girlfriend Shelby (Anna Brewster, two notes) — we know she is edgy because she is introduced walking into a bar to Portishead’s ‘Glory Box’. The couple present Bricke with a plan to lift $30 billion just before the killer signal is active, a way of getting back at the system that killed his brother in prison.
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So far, so routine DTV action flick. But as it should move forward into fun heist-movie territory (of course there are crosses and double crosses), Megaton and writer Karl Gajdusek bulk out the story with an extended detour into Bricke and Cash clashing with the latter’s crime-lord father (Patrick Bergin), and a dull-as-dish-water sub-plot involving Sharlto Copley as a cop hopped up on John Wayne movies cruising the city streets. Occasionally Megaton drops some fancy stylistic flourishes and Pitt has some fun channelling Christopher Walken, but the film makes increasingly heavy, unpleasant weather of what could have been a short, sharp pot-boiler. By the end you’ll happily take the high-pitch whining over the movie.

The Last Days Of American Crime takes a potentially entertaining, if silly, premise and drains it of any reason to get invested. You can just imagine a John Carpenter would have doubled the thrills in half the time.

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