The Last Days of American Crime
The year is 2025, and within a week the American Peace Initiative, “the cop within,” will be live, a broadcast signal which induces a molecular modulation in the prefrontal cortex which places a synaptic block on any unlawful activity: these are the last days of American crime, and the border to Canada is closed to prevent anyone fleeing in the unfolding chaos.
It’s been a year since bank robber Graham Bricke’s younger brother Rory was sent to prison where he supposedly killed himself, but the swaggering troublemaker Kevin Cash tells him otherwise, that Rory was a test subject for the API who died in the experiments. His fiancée Shelby Dupree a hacker who has a way into the API control centre, Cash is counting down to a billion-dollar heist for which he needs Bricke’s skills.
Based on the graphic novel of the same name by Rick Remender and Greg Tocchini, The Last Days of American Crime is adapted by Oblivion‘s Karl Gajdusek and directed by Colombiana‘s Olivier “Megaton” Fontana, a relentless depiction of a land of civil unrest, riots, tear gas and police brutality, of double crosses and endemic corruption and a control mechanism by which only the police will have the means to utilise lethal force.
The ethical arguments of the API pushed into the background, talking points on news broadcasts which are never expressed by the characters, whenever The Last Days of American Crime has the choice between intelligent and articulate dialogue or gunplay and explosions, it invariably chooses the latter, the soundtrack expressing more than the script and the incoming police state accepted as a fait accomplit in which Canada is somehow cast as the promised land.
Emotion principally expressed through breaking things, Megaton’s focus is on cool hardman posturing rather than narrative coherence, I Origins’ Michael Carmen Pitt reeking of twitchy duplicity as trigger-happy Cash, entitled prodigal son of the Dumois crime family, while The Force Awakens’ Anna Brewster’s pouting Dupree is supposedly able to seduce any man by her mere presence and Deliver Us From Evil’s Édgar Ramírez is wasted as Bricke, required only to express rage and lust.
The participation of Chappie’s Shartlo Copley presumably a contractual obligation of shooting in South Africa, his police officer could be entirely removed from the film without impacting the story in any appreciable way, but even were that done The Last Days of American Crime would still run for two painful hours, the unconvincing mechanics of the heist a tower of cards founded on a shaky premise and glossed over with nihilistic violence.
The Last Days of American Crime is streaming on Netflix now
