New Netflix movie earns scorchingly bad zero score on Rotten Tomatoes
The Last Days of American Crime is ranking lower than the infamous box office bomb Battlefield Earth.
- Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year" award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
The Last Days of American Crime is based on the graphic novel by Rick Remender.
It's tough for a movie to be universally hated. Even a box office bomb like John Travolta's infamous 2000 film Battlefield Earth has a 3 percent positive rating over at Rotten Tomatoes. But the new Netflix movie The Last Days of American Crime, released on June 5, has managed to land itself a rare rating of zero on the Tomatometer at Rotten Tomatoes as of Wednesday. It does slightly better on CNET sister site Metacritic, scoring a 16.
That zero rating means that none of the 24 critics' reviews at Rotten Tomatoes are positive. It does slightly better with regular viewers, earning an audience score of 27 percent after 161 user ratings.
The plot, based on the graphic novel by Rick Remender, sounds intriguing. The US government "plans to broadcast a signal making it impossible for anyone to knowingly commit unlawful acts." So before crime is effectively relegated to the history books, a group of criminals plot one huge heist.
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But plot can only get you so far. Filmmakers also have to deliver on the idea.
"Don't care about story, characters or words, but love violence? Even you will be disappointed," writes Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post.
"On paper, it looks like fun. Too bad it's no fun whatsoever," writes John Serba of Decider.
"Poorly written, ineptly directed and possibly the longest movie ever made in terms of how it feels," writes Brian Tallerico on RogerEbert.com. (The film runs a whopping two hours, 28 minutes.)
Still, people are watching: On Tuesday, Netflix listed the movie at No. 7 on its "Top 10 in the US Today" list, ahead of kid flick Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and the popular Avatar: The Last Airbender animated series. And Uproxx reported that The Last Days of American Crime was Netflix's top film of the weekend.
Wrote one viewer on Rotten Tomatoes, "I would give it -15% as I wasted 15 mins of my life that I'm never getting back."
And while not exactly in good company, the zero rating puts The Last Days of American Crime in, uh, some kind of company. Other films earning a zero on the Tomatometer include 2002's Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever, 1991's Return to the Blue Lagoon, and 2004's Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2.
