'Echo Boomers' Strands Michael Shannon In An Uninspired Activist Heist Flick [Review]

In the halcyon days of the early 2010s, it seemed like we had the luxury of worrying about one large scale social issue at a time. For a few months in the fall of 2011, the Occupy Wall Street protests that gripped Zuccotti Park dominated headlines, inspired similar actions around the world, and shined a much-needed light on economic inequality, a disparity that has only become more pronounced in the near-decade that has passed. “Echo Boomers,” a heist film that references Occupy and reverberates with millennial anger at shrinking opportunities as the wealthy get wealthier, seems perfectly poised for this particular moment when the pandemic has further exposed that precipitous chasm. However, told with all the depth of a long-discarded USA Today infographic left on a bench at Wall Street subway station, “Echo Boomers” is a rote genre exercise shouting leftover slogans from a movement that always had so much more to say.

When wide-eyed Lance (Patrick Schwarzenegger) blows into Chicago shouldering $60,000 of student debt, an art history degree, and — big shock — few job prospects, he’s excited by his cousin Jack’s (Gilles Geary) offer of a position at a “start-up” working in “acquisitions.” Lance doesn’t need a university education to deduce that Jack is working as part of a crew that combines activism with felony theft. Led by Ellis (Alex Pettyfer) and his girlfriend Allie (Hayley Law), the entrepreneurial criminals break into mansions, steal the goods, and hustle them through Mel (Michael Shannon). Mel provides them with the addresses, and whose front of a legitimate shipping business allows him to easily get rid of the pilfered goods to willing clients. Lance is pulled into the scheme because his knowledge of art history helps identify prized work. Each crew member feels they’ve been cheated by the system in some way, from an Afghan war vet who returned home ignored by his country, to a tech nerd who discovered that Silicon Valley dreams were made of empty bits and bytes. Thus, their activism takes form during the robberies, as they each participate in meticulously destroying and vandalizing the homes they’ve invaded, believing in all earnestness they’re Leaving A Message.

It’s difficult to understand what point director Seth Savoy (making his debut feature), and his co-writers Jason Miller and Kevin Bernhardt, are trying to convey. If there’s a parasitical irony to the wealthy buying valuable black market goods stolen from other wealthy people, it goes completely over their heads. It’s also difficult to discern if the filmmakers actually have a position on the crew’s rationalizations to justify their crimes. Savoy certainly enjoys filming the sequences of destruction, and even sets up a slick montage of the crew’s work with a rock ‘n roll soundtrack. But he seems less concerned in investigating their increasingly hollow insistence that the ends justify the means and the glaring fact that their work benefits no one else, and is simply lining their own pockets. Again, the filmmakers — along with the characters — seem oblivious to this glaring hypocrisy.

“Echo Boomers” is built around a flashback structure powered by Lance’s voiceover — he speaks from jail to author Lesley Anne Warren, who is researching a book about the crew’s criminal exploits. However, Lance offers little-to-no moral or political position on anything. Guiding the audience into this group’s political and criminal world, Lance merely plays observer, possessing a moral spine tends to bend whichever way the wind is blowing. Initially appalled upon finding out the truth behind Jack’s job offer, Lance is about to split town, until his cousin unconvincingly persuades him to stay with a lot of weak, and empty rhetoric. From there, Lance is along for the ride, only showing traces of conviction when a love triangle eventually rears its head, forcing his decision-making process to be mostly powered by romantic intentions. Lance’s political awakening, what little of it there is to show, is mostly transmitted in a series of facile “lessons” that he picks up along the way, and shares throughout the film, ranging from borrowed phrases usually found on placards (“If they don’t let us dream, we won’t let them sleep”) to worn-out clichés (“There’s a thin line between a friend and an enemy”).

As “Echo Boomers” wears on, it becomes increasingly clear that the Occupy motifs are merely a wrapper that Savoy and his team use to try and disguise the fairly unimaginative crime flick that they are more invested in. The film eventually builds to the inevitable One Last Heist, which predictably goes wrong, and its few surprises are blunted by the knowledge that we’ve already been told: Lucas rots in jail. Stranded behind in this tepid affair are better-than-this-film-deserves performances by a glowering Pettyfer and in particular, Shannon, who is always a pleasure to watch in his oily sleazebag mode (his friend and filmmaker Jeff Nichols is thanked in the credits, so maybe some favors were called in to get him to appear).

The filmmakers’ inability or unwillingness to actually engage with the discourse it builds “Echo Boomers” around leaves the film feeling both artificial and hysterical. Its understanding of how a generation chooses to voice their genuine concerns about the system and its impact on their future feels drawn from the worst nightmares of your parents and Fox News. Both the film and the movement it so recklessly draws from deserves much better. [D]

“Echo Boomers” is in Theaters, On Demand, and Digital on November 13th.