The word hero is somewhat subjective. For some, it might be embodied by someone like Captain America or Superman. For others, it might be summed up by Mister Rogers. A hero might be a doctor or firefighter, a soldier or an activist. It might even be a politician.
Or for a few—hopefully a very, very few—it might be Graham Bricke.
When we first meet Bricke, he’s torturing someone in an apartment strewn with dead bodies. He’s poured a bunch of diesel gasoline in a bathtub, saturated the guy with the fuel and sticks a burning cigar in his mouth.
“If you stay real still, maybe it will burn itself out on your face,” Bricke tells the bleeding man as he walks out the door.
You must forgive our hero. He’s been a bit out of sorts lately.
Little wonder. His brother, Rory, died recently in prison—killed himself, the authorities say. Bricke’s also still a bit touchy that his whole criminal gang was betrayed during a bank robbery gone wrong. To make matters worse, that might’ve been the very last opportunity for Bricke to commit a felony. See, crime itself will soon be a thing of the past.
Granted, crime has always been against the law in the United States, pretty much by definition. But the U.S. Government has now figured out a way to make it not just illegal, but impossible. It has figured out how to manipulate brain waves via radio tower: One flip of the American Peace Initiative signal, or API, and anyone with the intent to flout the law will instead flounder on the ground, helpless to rob even one measly liquor store. The feds plan to flip that switch in less than a week, much to the consternation of civil rights advocates (not to mention society’s oft-overlooked criminal class). Why, what’s America coming to when you can’t even key somebody’s car?
So you can see why Bricke might be in a let’s-burn-somebody-alive-in-a-bathtub funk.
But then Bricke runs into a guy named Kevin Cash, who tells him that Rory didn’t die by his own hand, but by the very same API signal about to be flipped. (The penal system was experimenting with the signal, Kevin says, which rendered Rory helpless when the guards decided to beat him to death.) So why not get revenge on the system by committing one last great heist before the API goes nationwide? Bricke can get revenge and get rich in one fell swoop, Kevin suggests.
It’s time to kill lots of people, steal billions, escape to Canada and perhaps, if Bricke plays his cards right, have some gratuitous sex with Kevin’s fiancée.
Yep, that’s right: It’s hero time.
So, maybe Bricke isn’t your stereotypical hero. In fact, he’s kind of a jerk. But he is perhaps the most sympathetic male character the movie offers us (which, frankly, says more about the movie than Bricke), and we do see that he cares for at least two people in his life: his dead brother Rory (whom he offers some sage, though not ultimately helpful, advice before Rory goes to the clink); and Shelby, Kevin’s previously mentioned fiancée. And we wind up seeing just how much he’s willing to sacrifice for her.
Shelby, too, has at least one merit in her ledger: She has a sister, for whom she’s willing to sacrifice a great deal.
So Bricke loves his brother, Shelby loves her sister, and they kinda sorta love each other. And if we ended our review right there, you’d have a wholesome, three-minute-long movie. But, as you might expect, the movie’s quite a bit longer.
Someone says that the API signal is the government “playing Jesus with people’s brains.” The movie concludes with Depeche Mode’s song “Personal Jesus” In another song, we hear lyrics about the “devil in a whiskey glass.”
Shelby and Bricke know each other for around three minutes before they have sex. She sidles up to him in a bar, suggestively sucks on an ice cube in his drink, tells him that she “deserves” the bruises he spots on her neck and waves him back to the bar’s dirty bathroom, where they hook up again. Once they’re done, the two meet Kevin and pretend like they’ve just met.
It’s fairly obvious early on, though, that Shelby prefers Bricke to Kevin, though, and they have an all-out affair. They (Shelby and Bricke) have sex at least one more time: Shelby’s completely naked (which we see, along with some graphic fondling), and they have a noisy, sultry, intimate encounter. Kevin is not entirely clueless about this state of affairs (if you will), and jokingly suggests that perhaps they should engage in a threesome.
While the dialogue stresses how smart Shelby is (we’re told she’s a hacker who once gave herself a degree from MIT), the plot itself forces her more into the role of sexual plaything: A very creepy FBI agent seems to both beat and sexually harass her, she’s drugged and nearly raped by someone, and she’s asked to seduce at least one law enforcement officer as part of their scheme. (He leans forward to kiss her, which she says will make the next part of her job so much easier before the camera cuts away. The next time we see the two, the man is tied to a chair, his shirt unbuttoned and his pants undone, with a gag ball tied securely to his mouth.)
Another woman exposes her breasts as she dances, in broad daylight, on the roof of a car to an appreciative audience. Women tend to dress provocatively, and a couple of scantily dressed ladies (called out as “lesbians” in the IMDb credits, though there’s no obvious romantic attachment between the two in the movie itself) buy an unknown drug from a shady dealer.
When Kevin runs into his grown, sultry-looking sister at the family compound, he lifts her up and tells her she’s gained a bit of weight. He also tells her (in so many words) that her skirt’s way too short, since he can see her privates underneath. (She later angrily invites Kevin to look at her breasts, using a crasser word.) Kevin’s father accuses Kevin of sleeping with his stepmom. (Kevin retorts that he introduced his father to her.) Kevin also feigns surprise that his dad isn’t engaged in a “Roman orgy” when he and Bricke stop by.
Men are sometimes seen shirtless. Women are seen in their underwear. Bricke showers, and we see him in the shower stall from above. (Nothing critical is shown.) A male thug performs an ironic lap dance on one of his own torture victims (also male).
After watching, you might understand why the government resorted to such a radical solution to keep folks from, y’know, killing each other. (Though if the movie had gone on for a couple more hours, killers might’ve had trouble finding new people to kill.)
Three or four dead bodies litter the apartment in the opening scene. Bullet holes adorn the corpses, and blood decorates the walls. The apartment later blows up from all the diesel fuel, but [Spoiler Warning] the man in the bathtub somehow survives. We see him, bloodied and bandaged, days later, hoping to exact revenge on Bricke in the very same manner. (The confrontation ends with flames, an explosion, and someone winds up dead.)
But we’re really just getting warmed up (so to speak).
We see a few people (some in flashback) get beaten to death. Others are beaten only to near death, bleeding profusely from their mouths as they’re repeatedly punched and occasionally kicked. Bricke slams someone’s head against the side of the bathtub (leaving a bloody mark on both the tub and the man’s head). A man’s cranium is lethally punctured by what looks like some sort of tribal weapon: His face is soon covered in blood, as is the desk upon which he expires.
Another guy is shish kabobbed in the throat by a shard of glass, killing him. A man’s ear is shot off by a shotgun. Someone takes a lethal neurotoxin. A woman is nearly choked to death. Two people get into a struggle over a gun: Eventually, the gun is maneuvered under the chin of one of the combatants, and the bullet is fired, spraying the other person in blood.
Several—perhaps dozens—of people are shot during various gunfights; their respective demises are often accompanied by a splash of blood. (A couple of people are shot upwards of a dozen times, leaving the car they’re sitting in awash in blood.) Others are shot but don’t die—struggling on despite the lead in their shoulders or guts or even chests. Threats and promises of long, painful torture are made. A doctor is referred to as the underworld’s “own Dr. Kevorkian.”
When the API signal clicks in, it’s apparently quite painful. It incapacitates anyone on the verge of a terrible, illegal deed via what appears to be an incapacitating headache: They slump to the ground, wincing and often holding their heads. A team of bank robbers is subjected to the API treatment during a heist, and one of the would-be thieves is shot in the gut when he’s incapacitated. He bleeds heavily and eventually expires.
We learn that Kevin’s father killed his mother. Someone pushes a burning cigar into another man’s chest. A guy, as he prepares to rape a helpless victim, is strangled from behind.
Nearly 130 f-words (often paired with the word “mother”), about 30 s-words and several other profanities, including “a–,” “b–ch,” “h—” and “p-ssed.” God’s name is misused once, and Jesus’ name is abused five times.
Several characters, both major and minor, smoke throughout the film. They drink a lot, too, and several critical scenes take place in pubs and night clubs.
When Kevin Cash brings Bricke back to his lair, Terry tries to be a dutiful host. “A drink?” Kevin asks. “Some cocaine? We got some great cocaine.” He later says that he has fantastic Scotch, as well. Kevin calls his sister “daddy’s little cokehead.”
A woman is forcibly injected with some sort of drug. Bricke buys a mysterious and lethal drug from an underworld doctor.
Most everyone we meet in this movie is, on some level, scum. People cheat, rob, lie, backstab, betray, abuse and insult one another. Anything else would be an aberration.
Shelby, after recovering from a drug she was forcibly given, vomits.
In 1983, a movie called Scarface showed up in theaters. It was one of the decade’s most controversial films, and it was initially given an X rating because of its violence and drug use. In the climactic scene, drug dealer Tony Montana hunkers down in his compound, stuffing his face in a massive mound of cocaine before pulling out a grenade launcher and gorily blowing up rival thugs invading his estate.
While watching The Last Days of American Crime, I wondered whether its director, Olivier Megaton, had watched Scarface and concluded that the 1983 flick was great as far as it went … but just too subtle, too restrained.
The Last Days of American Crime is many things, but “restrained” is not one of them. Curiously boring? Yes. Appalling? Absolutely. A miserable movie-watching experience for 15 minutes, much less the film’s two-and-a-half-hour runtime? Unquestionably. But not restrained.
Based on a 2009 graphic novel by Rick Remender and Greg Tocchini, The Last Days of American Crime is … well, sickening. This movie wallows in excess of every kind, and for no real purpose but to wallow. Its characters are driven largely by their worst impulses, and the story countermands none. It’s a mosquito of a narrative, driven by nothing but lust and blood.
The movie earned a notorious distinction, a rare 0% “freshness” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Honestly, I think Rotten Tomatoes might’ve been a bit generous.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
