Mark Reviews Movies: ECHO BOOMERS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 12, 2020

From the start, Echo Boomers comes at us with attitude and a sense of importance. The story is based on a true one—"if you believe in such things," the assault of text, flying toward the audience and shattering glass along the way, continues, just so we know this dramatization wants to be tough and cynical about matters. There's plenty of reason for that outlook, too.

Screenwriters Kevin Bernhardt, Jason Miller, and Seth Savoy (the last of whom also directed) tell the story of a group of 20-somethings—all of them college graduates, whose career prospects either have dried up or are non-existent—who rob the homes of wealthy people in the Chicago area. Their motives are a combination of financial gain, obviously, and anger with a system that promised these young people a lot but provided nothing.

If they studied hard, they could go to college. If they did well in college, they would get a job that could pay the bills. If they got a job, they could live the American Dream, just as all those people who told them to do all these things had done before them.

None of that, though, worked out, so here they are—scouting big houses in the suburbs, waiting for the occupants to leave, stealing what's worth something, demolishing the rest. It's easy to understand the appeal of this story, as a sort of twisted wish-fulfillment, as a warning about the consequences of economic inequity, or as a cautionary tale of letting one's grudges against society overwhelm one's senses of legality and morality.

The movie's own stance might seem pretty clear. After its initial rush of a robbery in progress, we meet Lance (Patrick Schwarzenegger), one of the thieves, as he's about to tell his side of the story to an author (played by Lesley Ann Warren). He's doing so from the visiting area of a prison.

Bernhardt, Miller, and Savoy certainly want us to take something from this fact-based tale, narrated at different times by one of two of the gang of robbers. In that opening dialogue between Lance and the writers, issues of the generation gap emerge, and the filmmakers take the time to explain the backgrounds of each of the thieves as soon as Lance meets them (Basically, all of them tried to live an ordinary life but were stopped along the path). Once the gang's scheme becomes apparent, though, any attempt at thoughtfully dissecting the motives, the hypocrisies, the philosophy of these characters, as well as the underlying social woes driving their crimes, are more or less forgotten or ignored.

Lance, who recently graduated college with an art degree, joins the gang under false pretenses. His cousin Jack (Gilles Geary) has invited him to Chicago, promising a job opportunity. In reality, Jack hopes that Lance can help the thieves identify valuable artwork in the targets' homes. After a quick moral crisis is resolved with a night of drinking and drugs (The group blows the money they make almost immediately—an addiction feeding other addictions and the appearance of the kind of material success they're supposedly rebelling against), Lance decides to join the group.

The most important members are the cousins, Allie (Hayley Law), and Ellis (Alex Pettyfer), the mastermind and Allie's increasingly jealous/paranoid boyfriend. We get a sense of how the operation works. Mel (Michael Shannon, threateningly weaselly), who runs a shipping company, gives the gang an address and a list of items he wants, obtained from a crooked insurance agent. The group steals and gets paid. Meanwhile, Ellis has a backup plan for a big, final heist, in case Mel ever becomes a problem, and Lance and Jack want to get ahead of Ellis, in case he ever becomes a problem.

With all of the resulting procedure (emphasized by running narration by Lance, who also provides a list of rules the gang followed, and, later, Ally) and drama within the group, whatever point the filmmakers might be attempting to make with this story becomes lost. It's less about the deeper causes of the gang's crimes and more about bickering, growing distrust, and increasing recklessness, inevitability leading toward their downfall. Basically, the movie becomes little more than a customary heist story—albeit one with an intriguing hook, some admirable energy, and a few fine performances. Schwarzenegger stands out as a seemingly decent guy whose disillusionment mounts, until his only regret is that he wasn't able to get away with everything.

What does all of this mean, though? That's a question the filmmakers pose early and often, but as the movie's focus shifts away from its more consequential queries and toward the far more routine elements of such a story, we're no longer even certain what questions we should be pondering. Did these young people catch a bad break? They did. Were they wrong to do what they did? They were. Does Echo Boomers ultimately have anything to say beyond those facts? It doesn't.

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