The system is messed up... it creates gales promises
A gang of graduates turn into art thieves in new movie Echo Boomers. LAURA HARDING talks to stars Alex Pettyfer and Patrick Schwarzenegger
IT IS safe to say Alex Pettyfer had a smashing time on the set of his latest movie Echo Boomers. The thriller puts a new spin on the classic heist film, with the Magic Mike star heading up a gang of disaffected millennials who feel they are forced to pursue a life of crime because of unjust economic opportunities. The group rob wealthy people’s homes of valuable artworks and vandalise the houses in the process as an act of protest about inequality.
“I have a weird relationship with smashing stuff up,” muses Stevenage-born Alex over Zoom. “My dad was a builder, and when I was growing up would always bring me in to help either knock down a wall or help with brick laying, so for me it’s a gentle reminder of hard labour as a young boy, helping my dad out.”
“I was a little bit safety cautious, I was wondering why we didn’t have goggles or gloves! But obviously it’s a movie and the things we are smashing up are not real, they are sugar glass.”
Alex, 30, stars as college graduate Ellis Beck opposite Patrick Schwarzenegger (son of Arnold), as Lance, another graduate who studied art history and took on a load of student debt in the process of getting his degree. Lance soon discovers the job market isn’t exactly flush with opportunities and so takes up his cousin’s offer to join the “start-up” he works at.
Lo and behold, Lance is soon part of the gang, identifying the most valuable artworks on behalf of their big boss, Mel, played by Boardwalk Empire’s Michael Shannon, and smashing up huge glass chandeliers.
“That was fun,” Patrick, 27, admits.
“I had a great time doing it, I only got to do it once or twice because [in] the whole first half of the movie I’m not really doing any of the heists – those were fun days to film and let out a little stress.”
While the film has all the action you might expect from a movie about art thieves, it also highlights some real issues facing young people these days.
It takes its name from a phrase sometimes used to describe milllennials, due to them often being the offspring of the baby boomer generation (people born when birth rates spiked after the Second World War), and is said to be loosely based on a true story.
“I think this movie does have a lot of political and economic commentary without putting it right on the nose,” says Patrick, “but it’s fun because at the end of the day it’s still heists and robberies – which people love. People can kind of root for these guys because they understand it. I’m not saying it’s the right way to go about it, it’s not, but it is a system that has not been updated for a long time that is messed up and does create false promises.”
“The reality of student debt, and the system of it, hasn’t evolved over the years,” adds Alex, whose breakthrough role was starring as teenage spy Alex Rider in 2006’s Stormbreaker followed by parts in I Am Number Four and Endless Love.
“That translated into this movie in a weird dynamic where all the wrong choices that someone can make are for relatable reasons.
“I really caught on to that theme and thought it was something that was interesting.”
The film is hitting screens at a time when the generational inequality it reflects has only been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, the economic impact of which means school leavers and graduates are entering a bleak jobs market.
“It feels timely,” Alex says. But he remains hopeful about the prospects for young people.
“We live at such a rapid moving pace with technology. Someone said to me ‘What are the millennials going to do?’ and I said ‘What is interesting is when we are pulling the arrow back, we have to figure out how to let the arrow go and fly forward’.
“I think for a lot of people, they are going to band together. Some of the richest companies in the world are Amazon and Google and innovative companies, where it’s less about the qualifications that you have, and more about the appeal of who you are as a human being, what you are bringing to the table.
“I think a lot of people will soon find that when they do leave university or college, maybe they might find more success in the passions that endure over those four or however many years, and by banding together with the groups of people and creating these small business, they can grow into bigger businesses.”
Patrick, who made his film debut as a teenager in The Benchwarmers and has since appeared in Stuck in Love, Grown Ups 2 and Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse, before landing his first starring role in 2018’s Midnight Sun, nods in agreement.
“The film was a way of commenting on it without making the film all politicalbased,” he says.
“It has the commentary without being all about that. I think that is what makes it fun and intriguing for the audience, because at the end of the day they don’t want to watch a documentary on something telling them this is what is messed up, but it’s a fun way of using film as a medium to touch on those issues – then it’s more interesting.”
Echo Boomers is available on digital release from tomorrow