"Echo Boomers" routine but involving anyway with more style and attitude than substance

Echo Boomers (2020)

“Echo Boomers,” referring to generational discontent felt by the children of Baby Boomers, is a cautionary crime drama with an axe to grind and a screw-the-rich attitude. Is the system corrupt, or are post-college millennials just entitled for wanting instant gratification and thinking a job will just land in their laps? Writer-director Seth Savoy, making his feature debut, and co-writers Kevin Bernhardt and Jason Miller don’t bring too much insight into exposing this “burnout generation” of “spoiled babies” or the Occupy movement, and what amounts to a routine heist film of the cultural zeitgeist, it hits every inevitable beat. Still, even as another cynical, rebellious look at the American Dream, it is slickly made, urgent, and made reasonably involving by some engaging performances. 

“This is a true story…if you believe…in such things,” flashes on the screen in kinetic, bombastic fashion through shattered glass between news reports and talk-show conversations. “Echo Boomers” dramatizes a 2013 story that probably happened somewhere with a similar group of twenty-somethings, and it’s old from the sides of the punks themselves. Owing $60,000 in student loans, bright and promising art history major Lance (Patrick Schwarzenegger) is right out of college and not finding employment above minimum wage. Flying to Chicago to visit his cousin, Jack (Gilles Geary), he is promised a steady gig under false pretenses. What Jack fails to tell Lance is that the job involves committing home-invasion robberies and vandalism in the million-dollar suburbs with a focus in expensive paintings (and leaving a graffiti calling-card to make a statement). At first, Lance isn’t having it, especially when meeting poker-faced middleman Mel Donnelly (Michael Shannon) who makes sure their hits are airtight. It doesn’t take long, though, for Lance to give in when he feels more disillusioned by the world and begins liking the rush. Jack and the gang—Stewart (Oliver Cooper), Chandler (Jacob Alexander), Allie (Hayley Law), and leader Ellis (Alex Pettyfer)—become the closest thing Lance as to a real family, but the party cannot go on. The old members feel like Mel should be paying them more than he does, and then Lance and Jack become the brains to their own side hustle, leaving Ellis out of the loop.

Lance’s arc from fresh college graduate to a smug criminal is recounted in flashback by Lance himself—and soon enough, some of the other young perps—to an author (Lesley Ann Warren, with her entrancing voice) during his sentence. Billed only as “Author,” she hopes to write a book and maybe bridge the generation gap after she’s done listening to the thieves on the phone in the prison’s visiting area. There are valiant, if superficial, glimpses into understanding what makes the characters tick. When it comes to Allie’s turn to tell her side to the author and psychoanalyze her co-conspirators, it’s the one moment where the other members of the operation briefly receive backstories. For Lance, the job became an exciting addiction; he supposedly has an eye for art, too, and we are told that we knows every piece of art in the McMansions they steal from, but we never actually see it. 

There is a palpable rage inside Patrick Schwarzenegger (2019’s “Daniel Isn’t Real”) as the initially sympathetic Lance, putting him on a list of up-and-comers who are attractive models but could also be promisingly interesting actors if the challenging projects keep coming. Like Alex Pettyfer, who has come a long way since being a bland pretty boy, Schwarzenegger could take the same path. As chest-bumping cousin Jack and complicated token female Allie, Gilles Geary and Hayley Law (2020’s “Spontaneous”) both have watchable presences. Then there’s Michael Shannon, who can play a weaselly character effectively in his sleep at this point. With his intimidating intensity that could burn a hole through the screen, Shannon is still always commanding and more compelling than what the script allots him as Mel.

Director Seth Savoy doesn’t fall into the trap of celebrating the destruction, keeping Lance as the moral high ground, at least for a while. It might be intoxicating in the moment, but this is not a lifestyle that can last. These kids trash each home they break into and then blow their earnings on “cocktail nights,” where they get coked out of their minds and drink the night away at high-class clubs. As if they are political prisoners, do these kids deserve what they think they are owed? No, not anymore. Like the ten rules Lance lists off to the author that end up not mattering, there might be little to actually debate or think about after “Echo Boomers.” It’s fairly empty rhetoric, but it can be a thrill to watch while it lasts. 

Grade: C +

Saban Films is releasing “Echo Boomers” (94 min.) in theaters, on demand and digital on November 13, 2020.