I’ll cut straight to the chase, Netflix’s latest action
release - The Last Days of Crime in America is a thoroughly underwhelming film,
and that’s putting it nicely. Its 1 hour, 49 minutes of my life that I will not
be getting back, so I consider it my civic duty to save you from a similar fate.
NON-SPOILER REVIEW
Based on a graphic novel of the same name, the film is set
in a dystopian America where crime is the norm and criminals are treated as a
special kind of celebrity. However, the government has come up with a potential
solution to permanently put an end to crime in the country. The American Peace
Initiative or A.P.I is an electronic pulse like signal which prevents would-be
criminals from committing heinous acts by painfully paralyzing them when they
attempt to commit a crime.
The movie starts off in the days leading to the launch of
the A.P.I and the events that follow, as a female narrator banally introduces the
audience to this world and its characters. Edgar
Ramirez stars as Graham Bricke; a superstar Bank Robber (who for one with a
very British name doesn’t sound very American) dealing with an existential crisis after the death of his brother and the fallout of his gang after
they are betrayal by a member. As Bricke contemplates his current predicament,
he is approached by sexy bad girl - Shelby Dupree (Anna Brewster), who he shags
within minutes before meeting her wannabe crime lord boyfriend - Kevin Cash, played by Michael Pitt of Boardwalk Empire fame, and from that point on the
plot thickens…for the worse.
Mostly filler and no killer, the convoluted plot attempts to
do so many things at once and ends up doing neither. Like a bad collage, you
can think of every worn-out trope in the action-heist genre and this film will
deliver it. Character development is awfully poor as the subplots concerning Bricke,
Shelby and Kevin are horribly executed adding very little substance to their
character’s actions throughout the film.
And to add to the already chaotic plot, this movie boasts
some of the worst acting I’ve seen in a long time, some of the supporting
actors are quite terrible, so much that it feels like they’re sharing a private
joke about who can deliver the worst acting, and the action scenes feel like
they’ve been hijacked from a 90s movie. Lest I forget, you also get to watch Sharlto
Copley (District 9, A-Team, Elysium) act like he’s playing policeman, by driving
and walking around the city every now and then, and by the end of the movie I still
couldn’t, for the life of me figure why he was even in the film since he’s
absolutely inconsequential to anything that happens.
It’s genuinely baffling that a movie this bad was made in
2020, considering the standard of movies at this time. The closest I ever came
to intrigue was watching Anna Brewster’s Shelby say she fucked Bricke because fucking
a Loser was on her ‘To-do-List’, and even that turned out to be a desperate attempt
to engineer shock factor for the next scene.
A tediously unexciting and poorly executed comic book
adaptation, this movie will only makes sense if you force it to.
Reject Rating: 3/10
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