It’s been a while since I engaged in some cinemasochism, so let’s take another dip into that hallowed hall of hogwash that is the Rotten Tomatoes 0% club. And I’ll be honest, I wasn’t even expecting to hate this all that much. I’ve been more than charitable with Olivier Megaton’s movies in the past, walking away from stuff like the Taken sequels with far less disdain than a lot of other critics out there. Yeah, they weren’t all that great, or even decent, but maybe there’s something in me that’s got a soft spot for his frenzied overload style of action. I even hunted down the original comic book this is based on, and again, it didn’t blow me away or anything, but it’s a pretty solid crime yarn. Maybe these two worlds will collide into something that I’ll see some merit in that most others didn’t.
Or maybe I’ll walk away thinking that even the film’s biggest detractors were far too lenient with what is undoubtedly one of the worst films of the year. Like, everything about this, from the Impact font-ass opening credits, to Depeche Mode getting dragged into the cesspit over the end credits, is wrong.
Let’s start with the acting: It sucks. Édgar Ramírez tries to aim for stone-cold killer as Bricke, but only ends up being so nondescript and dull that he becomes part of the scenery. That’s the case for a lot of the actors here, including Anna Brewster as femme fatale Shelby, whose plainness is only offset by how trashy the treatment of her character is, and Sharlto Copley as police officer Sawyer would fall into the realms of aggressively lame, if it weren’t for the fact that his presence here means diddly-dick for the rest of the story. The only person here who seems to be having any fun is Michael Pitt as Kevin Cash, and even then, that’s largely because he seems to have based his entire performance off of James Franco as not-Riff-Raff in Spring Breakers.
How about the action? Well, even considering how charitable I’m willing to be towards Megaton, this is incredibly weaksauce. The shootouts are phenomenally uninteresting, the car chases are overedited to fuck, and the fist fights seem to think that just the act of breaking glass tables and displays is enough to show impact. But even that pales in comparison to the film’s cred as an action-thriller, as this film’s pacing is absolute snail slime. And that’s not even because of the two-and-a-half-hour running time, although that certainly doesn’t help; if I couldn’t abide The Irishman, there’s no chance I was gonna accept this.
The film is framed around a countdown timer to when the US government will activate the API, a signal that forcibly stops people from knowingly breaking the law, with Bricke, Shelby, and Kevin pulling off one last heist before it goes up. Except the film’s sense of time is all over the shop; we start with five days left till the API goes live, then a following scene says there’s still a week left before that happens, and then a little over half the film takes place in the final 24 hours. And the filmmakers seem entirely unable to create tension out of this literal ticking clock, making this already-overlong mess even more of a slog to sit through. Really says something when Kevin taking far too long to say five words is as taut as this thing ever gets.
Then there’s the overall aesthetic of the film, namely as a look at a near-future America in the grip of an authoritarian police state. Olivier Megaton apparently got all his understanding of American culture from Scorsese flicks, Sons Of Anarchy, and the Fast & Furious series, as the attempts to depict rough-and-rugged outlaws and power-hungry coppers in their element is largely informed by stereotypes and some really, really tacky song choices. Personal Jesus over the end credits is bad enough, but then there’s the initial scene when Bricke first meets Shelby at a bar. Starting out pleasantly enough with Portishead’s Glory Box playing in the background, they then proceed to fuck in the bathroom to a particularly shitty remix of Let Me Be Your Dog. I swear, the Weird Al parody would’ve been a better fit.
This is made worse by how the film treats its rather timely subject matter, showing the worst-case scenario for events already taking place in America, and yet managing to be even more toothless than The Hunt as far as actually commenting on it. I maintain that Hunt is ultimately useless as political satire, but it at least showed enough understanding that there was indeed a problem with the current political discourse, if not exactly how to critique it. Here, the notion of free will being taken away from the populace at the hands of an overpowered police force is treated with a worryingly apathetic eye, as mere story backdrop at best and mundane at worst. I specify ‘at worst’ because, in today’s climate, treating this scenario as anything resembling normal might be the single worst take possible.
What makes all of this even more infuriating is down to the classic adaptation line: The book did it better. Not only that, but this can’t even slide by on the notion that the changes it made were at least in line with the intent of the source material, as the alterations here range from pointless to full-blown self-sabotage. There’s a lot of minor changes, like how Bricke was originally the mastermind behind the heist but is instead roped into it by Kevin in this version, or the new addition of Sawyer as a policeman who is literally two days away from retirement, what could have been a vehicle for commentary on the police but only ends up highlighting how fucked-up the film’s approach to that is, when it can even be bothered to attempt it in the first place.
But the biggest change here is something that cuts right into what made the source material work, and why this adaptation is such a fucking joke: The world-building outside of the API. In the source material, the API is only part of the plan to eliminate crime forever, with the other being the phasing out of paper money entirely and replacing it with government-sanctioned money cards, something entirely absent from this version. It may seem like a minor point, but it’s the kind of change-up that’s comparable to Watchmen’s reduction of world-building from book to film. Only I’m willing to defend those changes as far as adaptation goes, since what was altered there didn’t end up completely negating the larger discussion about superheroes that surrounded it.
Here, though, it results in a rewrite so goddamn stupid that it basically flies in the face of why the source material is worth reading in the first place: The title is ironic, because the API isn’t even capable of ending crime. Crime is rarely the result of someone just being a moustache-twirling villain, and in the case of the truly mentally unhinged (criminal sociopaths, for instance), it’s quite impossible to knowingly break a law when you can’t perceive the world as having laws in it in the first place.
By removing this, not only does it end up making both the main characters and the police force hunting after them look rock-stupid, since tracking unable-to-be-laundered money should have rendered the entire heist pointless, it also goes from highlighting the fundamental flaw in this plan into reinforcing the idea that nihilism is the way to win the day. When a character declares that, because they know that nothing means anything and is thus immune from the API, that makes them the superhero in this world, I felt like I was about to gain my own superpower and knock down a wall from across the room through sheer rage.
There is not a single thing here that merits existence, let alone being sat through. The source material was a three-issue series, totalling around 160 pages and about an hour’s reading time altogether. It manages to give more definitive comments about police brutality, the reality of crime, and the importance of free will than this film ever could in over twice the time. Even mathematically, this thing doesn’t work.
The actual film craft on display here is horrendous, the acting is mesmerisingly inconsistent, and while the adaptation choices are quite irritating as someone who has read the source material, even that’s not the genuinely infuriating part for me. That comes with how this film is so wishy-washy about its setting and its subject matter, the most it manages to do is normalise the dystopian fucking nightmare the story takes place in. It goes far beyond missing the point, and lands right in the middle of What-The-Fuck-Were-You-Even-Thinking Town.
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