The Last Days of American Crime

Perhaps the novel on which The Last Days of American Crime is based hangs together more gracefully on the page, but the movie is a meandering, illogical, sloppy, and gratuitously violent mess. Director Olivier Megaton seems to be in way over his head. The actor playing the lead (Edgar Ramirez) is supposed to be American, but has an unexplained foreign accent, which seems intriguing but is left, well, unexplained. The leading crime family has a French name, Dumois, pronounced correctly by Americans, making this even more confusing. The movie seems to suggest that violence and guns are uniquely American and that escaping over the border to Canada will somehow put an end to a war between criminals and cops, as if Canada has no law enforcement.

At nearly two-and-a-half undisciplined hours, exposition goes on and on, with long monologues trying to explain incomprehensible backstory. Sometimes the voice of an unidentified female narrator pops up with a tidbit of information, as if at one point the director realized he had a lot of explaining to do, but the task was so overwhelming he just gave up. Subplots, like one involving a cop who gets his implant at the last minute, aren't just irrelevant, but also add unnecessary length to a tediously overlong script. Time might have been spent clarifying the role of counterfeit bills, or seemingly out-of-nowhere suicide pills that don't work, or why the API seems to cause excruciating pain in criminals, but then suddenly doesn't anymore. And how the heck did a man who was doused in gasoline survive a fiery explosion relatively unscathed?