The Last Days of American Crime (2020)

The Last Days of American Crime arrives in a near-future Detroit with a government about to broadcast a synaptic blocker that will make lawbreaking impossible, and a crew of crooks racing to rob the money factory before virtue becomes mandatory. It is based on a 2009 comic, directed by Olivier Megaton, and released by Netflix in June 2020, which placed its imagery of police chokeholds and state violence directly into the path of the George Floyd protests. The result was a 0 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and a critical consensus that reads like a coroner's note. None of this was the film's intention. Intentions rarely help.

The casting is international by logistics: a Venezuelan lead, South African supporting players, a production shot in Cape Town and Johannesburg. That arrangement produces a diverse ensemble without any accompanying argument, and the film makes no mention of race at all. Anna Brewster's Shelby is a gifted hacker who survives to the final frame, which sounds like progress until we note that she is also injected with heroin, held hostage, strangled, and nearly raped, all in service of motivating the men around her. The heist targets a government buyback of criminal wealth, which gestures toward a critique of capital without ever committing to one. The film wants the aesthetics of resentment and none of its conclusions.

Every other category of contemporary social concern is simply absent. No LGBTQ characters, no climate anxiety, no body positivity, no neurodivergent perspective, no reworking of history. Critics agreed the film had nothing to say, and they were right in the most literal sense: it moralizes about nothing, lectures about nothing, and delivers its dystopia through sleaze and gunfire. We are left with a heist picture that runs 149 minutes and carries no thesis whatsoever. There is a kind of purity in that, though not the kind anyone involved was aiming for, and not the kind an audience can be asked to sit through twice. The classification is straightforward. The film is a comic adaptation, a streaming curiosity, and a cautionary exhibit about release timing. Nothing more is on offer, and nothing more should be claimed for it.

The film's single accidental contribution to the culture was a lesson in scheduling. It said nothing, meant nothing, and has been remembered chiefly for arriving at the wrong moment. That is a legacy, of sorts. It is not a thesis, and it is not a message. It is a release calendar, and it is the only thing here with anything resembling a point of view.