Great art isn’t just about expressing oneself but having something to say. Okay, so that is not an original thought but a borrowed one with which I agree a hundred percent. (Read more here.)
Netflix’s latest sci-fi thriller The Last Days of American Crime, has nothing useful to say. With its glorified police highhandedness and mindless violence, there are those who say the film would have bombed in any setting.
But in times of police brutality and a global pandemic, the movie has particularly hit a sore point.
No wonder the Netflix original has earned the honourable egg score on the Tomatometer on Rotten Tomato. A rare honour which has only been won by a handful of films in the past.
Critics are resounding in their verdict that the film’s creators have nothing new to say in their film.
American Crime joins only 42 other films to receive a 0% critics score, including Netflix’s “The Ridiculous 6” from Adam Sandler, “Gotti” starring John Travolta, 1990’s “Problem Child,” “Staying Alive” (also starring Travolta) and “Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol.”
Based on the Radical Publishing Graphic Novel created by Rick Remender and Greg Tocchini, the movie is directed by Olivier Megaton, written by Karl Gajdusek, and produced by Jesse Berger, Jason Michael Berman, and Barry Levine.
Meanwhile, it also remains curiously one of the most popular films on Netflix, currently ranking at No 2 in the streamer’s list.
That said, the streamer now tallies popularity based on how many accounts in the previous 24 hours watched at least 2 minutes of a title. (Its earlier method of measuring noted how many households watched at least 70% of a title)
We never know, articles like this one could actually be giving negative publicity to the film. So many views could be just curious readers taking a glimpse of what makes the film so bad.
Take ours and Rotten Tomatoes’ word to know the film is bad. Watch the trailer instead and that not the official one on Netflix’s channel.
What the hell were you thinking Netflix?
According to the official synopsis, the film begins with the U.S. government planning to broadcast a signal which would make it impossible for anyone to commit unlawful acts wilfully.
Graham Bricke (Édgar Ramírez), a career criminal looking to make it big, teams up with famous gangster progeny Kevin Cash (Michael C. Pitt), and black market hacker Shelby Dupree (Anna Brewster), to commit the last crime in American history before the magic signal goes off.
According to Rolling Stone’s David Fear “this rancid mixture of ‘Purge’-lite sci-fi dystopia and heist flick…is now a textbook example of tone-deafness and extremely bad timing.” He added, “Netflix, what the hell were you thinking?”
IndieWire’s David Ehrlich said of the movie “A braindead slog that shambles forward like the zombified husk of the heist movie it wants to be” and “a death march of clichés that offers nothing to look at and even less to consider.”
For Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri the “ghastly, unimaginative mess” of a film was actually “yet another insipidly sleazy, lizard-brain shoot-’em-up” which would go down like an “oversize flaming lead balloon” irrespective of when it would have been released.
Finally, Variety‘s Peter Debruge termed the film “gory, excessive and frequently incoherent” which is “an offensive eyesore in which looting and anarchy are treated as window dressing, law and order come in the form of mind control, and police brutality is so pervasive as to warrant a trigger warning.”
The audience score for The Last Days Of American Crime is meanwhile 27% (based on 198 user ratings) on Rotten Tomatoes. It may be noted that the ratings website is a part of NBCUniversal’s Fandango.
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