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THE BONE COLLECTOR
Rating: 
USA. 1999.
Director – Phillip Noyce, Screenplay – Jeremy Iacone, Based on the Novel by Jeffrey Deaver, Producers – Martin & Michael Scott Bregman & Louis A. Stroller, Photography – Dean Semler, Music – Craig Armstrong, Visual Effects – The Computer Film Co, London (Supervisor – Robert Grasmere), Special Effects – Les Productions de l’Intrigue (Supervisor – Louis Craig), Production Design – Nigel Phelps. Production Company – Universal/Columbia/Bregman.
Cast:
Denzel Washington (Lincoln Rhyme), Angelina Jolie (Amelia Donaghy), Michael Rooker (Captain Howard Cheney), Queen Latifah (Thelma), Ed O’Neill (Detective Paulie Sellitto), Luis Guzman (Kenny Ortiz), Mike McGlone (Detective Kenny Solomon), Leland Orser (Richard Thompson), John Benjamin Hickey (Dr Barry Lehmann)
Plot: A wealthy New York couple are picked up in a taxi and later Amelia Donaghy, a patrol officer assigned to youth services, finds the husband’s mutilated body buried near a railway line. Police go to consult forensics expert Lincoln Rhyme who has been left a bedridden quadraplegic, paralyzed from the neck down by a falling beam in the course of an investigation. Impressed by Amelia’s instinct, Lincoln requests her to head the investigation, despite her reluctance and lack of experience. With she operating as his remote eyes and hands, he tries to track the serial-killing taxi driver down as further bodies continue to be discovered.
This was the one in a whole line of forensic psychology thrillers that emerged following the success of The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Others include When the Bough Breaks (1993), Se7en (1995), Copycat (1995), Kiss the Girls (1997) and tv’s Cracker (1993-5), Millennium (1996-9), Profiler (1996-9) and CSI: Crime Scene Investigators (2000– ). As such it is an average if not particularly great entry in this subgenre.
The film was greeted with a number of critical kneejerk reactions – “grisly and unpleasant” and “gaping plot holes” being the two most recurrent. Neither of which are true. (There are times you get the impression that critics copy what one another say). TV’s Millennium was frequently far more grisly and went into a far darker territory than anything here. (And when someone knowingly goes into a forensic psychology thriller then comes out accusing it of being grisly is like criticizing a Disney film of being cute or an X-rated film of being explicit – it kind of comes with the territory). One looked carefully for plot holes but failed to find any gaping gaps apart from the slightly far-fetched climactic revelation of the killer’s identity (that someone could get a job so close to the hero and would weave such an elaborate pattern of killings for revenge’s sake) but most of the feats of superhuman ingenuity displayed by the criminal geniuses in the post-Silence of the Lambs thrillers have required far greater stretches of believability than this.
The film’s greatest problem is not plot holes but rather that its plot isn’t very interesting. The film is directed by Australian Phillip Noyce. Noyce has directed a number of high-profile A-budget thrillers after emerging onto the international stage with Dead Calm (1989). His films tend to fall between the quite good – Dead Calm, Clear and Present Danger (1994) – and the slickly packaged but uninspired – Patriot Games (1992), Sliver (1993) and The Saint (1997) – while immediately subsequent to The Bone Collector he really began to prove himself with Rabbit Proof Fence (2001) and The Quiet American (2002). The strength of the abovementioned forensic psychology thrillers is their ability to twist an audience around and dazzle with the revelations of psychological patterns and meaning. But unlike even lesser forensic psychology thrillers such as Kiss the Girls, Noyce never keeps an audience pinned to the unfolding plot revelations. The twists and unfurling clues here hold no suspense, no collective sighs as one suddenly sees the pattern coming together. Even the climax here seems a perfunctory affair (although it does quite inventively show that being a quadriplegic doesn’t make one entirely helpless against an attacker).
If the film had relied on the thriller aspect alone, it would have been quite dull. On the other hand what does make it work is the novelty of having the detective hero helpless from the neck down and the central relationship between Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. It is during Angelina’s ventures down into the killer’s lairs guided by Denzel’s voice that Noyce crafts the film at its most tensely suspenseful. Noyce also has a good cast at hand. Denzel Washington, an actor who can command the screen without seeming to be exerting any effort, is on fine form. Noyce also has good actors such as Michael Rooker, Queen Latifah and Luis Guzman, even Ed O’Neill (doing a good job of shaking his typecasting as a live-action version of Homer Simpson from tv’s Married with Children [1987-97]), in the supporting parts which help make the scenes of police in-politicking work well. The only weak link is Angelina Jolie. In her early films Jolie – here shortly before being propelled to A-list superstardom in Girl, Interrupted (1999) later that same year – seemed to have all the distinction of a mannequin whenever she appears on screen. Even her looks seem to vanish into a routine blankness – all that one remembers about her is her collagen-injected lips. She survives here thanks to a strong and well-written female part – but you never could call it a well-acted part.
The one other plus about the film is Dean Cundey’s photography. Cundey transforms New York into a haunted otherworld. It is a film filled with frequently breath-taking shots – aerial shots cruising across the rooftops of skyscrapers, zooms that leap backwards from the site of a murder to cross half the city and pull back in through Denzel’s apartment window in an instant, shots where moody skies have had the colour damped down so that the city looks like it is filled with perpetually brooding stormclouds. Although there does seem something a little odd when you get a vision that plays so much on being New York City but is directed and photographed by two Australians (Noyce and Semler) and actually shot on location in Montreal.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999
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