Starting with its title, Seth Savoy’s smug thriller Echo Boomers comes off as a flailing attempt to exploit generational malaise for cheap, quick thrills. It’s like someone took an “OK boomer” meme and welded it to a generic crime thriller, then bragged about their bold originality. Set in 2013, Echo Boomers opens with a montage of news clips about difficulties faced by millennials, from grim job prospects to financial instability. “This is a true story, if you believe in such things” blares an onscreen title in literal blinking neon, just in case the audience hasn’t gotten the message that they are about to confronted with edgy, uncomfortable truths.
Instead what follows is a clichéd thriller about a gang of thieves torn apart by internal conflict, sprinkled with a handful of platitudes about the haves and the have-nots. The story is framed by interviews conducted by a nameless journalist (Lesley Ann Warren) who is working on a book about this notorious group of young outlaws. Her main focus is on Lance (Patrick Schwarzenegger), the group’s final recruit and seemingly its most thoughtful, empathetic member. Lance recounts his personal story, starting with his arrival in Chicago to accept a job offer from his cousin Jack (Gilles Geary).
Jack claims to work for a startup, but it’s clear from the beginning that his actual job involves illegal activity. He keeps Lance in the dark until the moment that Jack and his associates are breaking into a fancy house, and Lance has no choice but to join them. The six-member team gets its orders from a fence named Mel (Michael Shannon, giving the movie’s only memorable performance), who doesn’t care about their penchant for social commentary and is just interested in moving high-end art and other luxury goods that he can sell on the black market.
The movie portrays the group’s activities as noble if misguided, but spray-painting slogans on the walls of rich people’s plundered mansions certainly isn’t going to change the world. When the group finally gets attention for its message of millennial disaffection, the coverage comes in a physical newspaper, the quintessential symbol of outdated boomer culture. Maybe that’s sly commentary on the futility of the group’s efforts, but it comes off more like Savoy and his co-writers Kevin Bernhardt and Jason Miller don’t understand the very generation they are attempting to represent. (It also doesn’t help that their millennial-crusader protagonist is played by an actor from the most privileged background imaginable, as the child of a movie star and the scion of the Kennedy family.)
Lance is at first reluctant to go along with Jack’s plan to bring him into the fold, and he gets a cold welcome from the group’s leader, Ellis (Alex Pettyfer), who suspects Lance of putting the moves on his girlfriend Allie (Hayley Law). But soon Lance becomes a zealot, buying into the message that the only way to rebel against the system is to steal from the rich and spray-paint pictures of penises on their bedspreads. A montage of job-interview rejections is meant to prove that Lance went into student-loan debt for no reason, that the system is stacked against him because no one will pay him a decent salary to put his art history degree to use.
Savoy is clearly influenced by David Fincher’s Fight Club, but his message remains superficial and vague, just like the catch phrases that Lance lists for the journalist as the “rules” he learned while working as a thief (that then show up as neon-colored onscreen titles). The warnings that the gang tags on walls at the houses they rob are equally empty sentiments, and the signatures they leave make them the hipster equivalent of Home Alone’s "wet bandits." The central narrative just recycles crime drama clichés, as the members of the gang start to turn on each other, and Jack tells Lance about his plan for the one last big job that will set them up for life.
Schwarzenegger remains a blank, slack-jawed performer, who fails to convey Lance’s supposed deep intelligence and moral outrage, and Lance’s associates are hastily sketched characters who are each meant to be emblematic of some aspect of millennial rage. During her interview with the journalist, Allie gives facile explanations of each of her associates, analyzing their personalities based on what they choose to destroy first when the gang trashes a house. That’s all the character development the movie provides, even as Lance’s connection with Allie, and Ellis’ jealousy, become more important to the story.
Making his feature debut, Savoy has a visual style close to the promotional clips and music videos that kick-started his career, and Echo Boomers feels more like a millennial-targeted ad campaign than a serious social statement or a compelling thriller. “I’m a political prisoner,” one of the gang’s imprisoned members whines to the journalist during his interview with her, and that complaint carries all the weight of a toddler having a tantrum about not getting ice cream for dinner. Echo Boomers tries to be a rallying cry for unjustly maligned millennials, but the best it can muster for the frustrated generation is a pathetic self-own.
Starring Patrick Schwarzenegger, Gilles Geary, Hayley Law, Alex Pettyfer, Oliver Cooper, Jacob Alexander, Lesley Ann Warren and Michael Shannon, Echo Boomers opens Friday, Nov. 13 in select theaters and on VOD.