The Last Days of American Crime Parent Guide

In The Last Days of American Crime, the United States has devised a solution to its growing problem with domestic terrorism and crime – a broadcast signal which prevents anybody from knowingly breaking the law. Seeing the end of their livelihood in sight, bank robber Graham Brick (Edgar Ramirez), crime lord’s son Kevin Cash (Michael Pitt), and expert hacker Shelby Dupree (Anna Brewster) get together and plan one last grand heist – the last crime in American history.

Let me start with the content concerns before I get too distracted and start ranting. There is no circumstance in which anybody should watch this movie, and that goes double for children. There are constant portrayals of gruesome violence, torture, graphic sex scenes, drug use, and enough profanity that I began to wonder if the screenwriter had heard of any other adjectives… or, for that matter, proper nouns or verbs. On top of all that, the only female character with any real screen time is treated as little more than a convenient sex object, occasionally branching out into “damsel in distress” territory. Even in this foul year of our Lord 2020, I would have expected more. This blood-soaked, sexually creepy, profanity-laced cinematic disaster richly deserves its TV-MA rating. My only regret is that there is no more restrictive TV rating and that my web program doesn’t allow me to give a grade lower than a “D-“. Trust me, if I could give this film an “F”, I certainly would.

One of the perils of this job (which is otherwise pretty cushy) is that, from time to time, I have to sit through some truly unbearable films. This one is bad enough that I’m thinking of applying for hazard pay. For two and a half hours, this movie runs a clinic on bad screenwriting, wooden acting, and the fine art of the non-sequitur. Not only is it a mess, it’s a boring and confusing mess. There are enough plot holes in this movie that you could use the script to drain pasta.

Having taken a number of creative writing classes in university, I’m more than familiar with janky and derivative student writing. The Last Days of American Crime is a prime example of what would happen if you took the worst undergraduate writing project, ran it through Google Translate three or four times, printed it out, and filmed it in its unedited incoherence. Not only are the characters phenomenally dull (I think Bricke was named for an object of similar charisma and interest), their actions are borderline random at times, and any plot “twists” just feel like the logical conclusion of their previous erratic behavior. The only real fun to be had in this movie is laughing hysterically as you watch South African filming locations try to masquerade as Detroit and its neighboring Canadian city, Windsor.

The Last Days of American Crime is a masterclass in incompetence. More than that, it’s an offensive and uninteresting masterclass in incompetence, and I’d like to sue the director for 149 minutes of my life back, along with the potentially permanent damage to the logic center of my brain. I could have had more fun sitting in the backyard and throwing rocks at my own toes. I cannot think of a single reason why anybody even slightly more alert than your average coma patient would sit through this whole movie – except, of course, the reason I did, which is money. Unless you’re getting paid to watch this, save yourselves.