THE BONE COLLECTOR
Worst gangbang flick of this or any year

  The kind of stupid piece of crap they assemble piecemeal from the worst clichés they can cannibalize from earlier, superior works of the genre, The Bone Collector gives Stigmata a run for its money in the "worst horror of the year" department.

The basic idea behind the killer is like an urban, reverse Hitcher - sure, we feel creepy about picking up a stranger but we allow ourselves to be picked up by one every time we call a cab.  Yeah, some New York cabbie is picking up unlucky fares and dooming them to horrible fates - and I mean horrible!  (steamed to death! eaten alive by rats!)  He's leading beat cop Angelina Jolie and her Casper Van Dien-like jaw on a cat-and-mouse chase where he keeps leaving clues for her, because if she just used real policework to catch somebody who didn't want to be caught, there wouldn't be a movie, I guess.

Along for the ride is Denzel Washington - well, from the neck up, 'cuz he's a quadriplegic (except for one working finger) (think there'll be a tender - and unintentionally hilarious - scene where Jolie tenderly caresses that finger?).  He plays a still-on-duty cop (!) who guides Jolie through this investigation, trying to steer her career into forensics because she has the guts to stop a train from running over homicide evidence.

This gimmicky, cliché-ridden movie is boring, stupid, predictable, and a blot on the career of everyone involved, except for Queen "Sphere" Latifah, who does this kind of shit all the time.  This is Denzel's weakest, blandest performance, and he's put in some weak, bland performances in his day.  Jolie fares a little better, but that jaw of hers and her creepy resemblance to her dad (Jon Voight) just threw me off for most of her screen time.

The rest of the cast has Ed "please take me seriously in a dramatic role" O'Neill as another cop, Queen Latifah as Washington's therapist, and Michael Rooker...poor Michael Rooker.  His role here is like crap squared.  You know how in police movies, there's always the one guy (sergeant, captain...higher-up than our heroes, anyway) whose only job is to BE WRONG AT ALL TIMES no matter how stupid being wrong reveals himself to be.  Note the "serves no purpose other than to give an example where this guy is wrong" scene where he finds a thumbprint on an obviously intentionally left-behind piece of evidence, and immediately and vehemently assumes it has to belong to the killer.  I mean, really, could a cop this stupid have moved this far up in the ranks without screenwriter intervention?  Yes, this role is crap.

But wait, I said it was crap squared.  You know how in serial killer whodunnit movies, there's always one character who the movie wants you to suspect, again and again and again?  This guy walks onto scenes with the accompaniment of thunder and lightning, he scowls and snarls throughout the film, he stymies our heroes' efforts at every turn, he's constantly shown by the director to be a likely culprit.  And only a complete idiot would actually still suspect him at this point, but right up til the end, we're obviously still meant to.  This guy performs the duties of two idiot cliché roles in just one role!  Crap-squared.

No, when the identity of the killer is revealed, YET AGAIN it's just the guy who has no other apparent purpose to be in this movie.  I had him pegged from his second scene, and felt silly that I hadn't done it during his first.  Oh well, he's only IN two scenes before he's revealed to be the killer.  The actor is recognizable, gets a lot of work these days...his first scene is pointless, his second, even moreso (and he only shows up in this scene to announce that he's there, as if to remind viewers who he is for when the climax comes).  I mean, DUH, could the killer possibly be anybody else?

Don't these writers learn that these "surprise!  THIS guy's the killer!" endings suck 99 times out of 100?  Jeez, Silence Of The Lambs didn't need an ending like that, nor did Seven...hell, even Copycat understood this.  This stupid piece of crap actually thinks its sending people home going "Man, I'd NEVER have suspected him!"

What good can be said about this movie is mostly in that director Philip Noyce conjures up some suitably ghoulish images, like the hand coming out of the ground, or the steam-scalded body shackled up in the corner (anybody else have to suppress a chuckle when Washington commanded Jolie to cut off the corpse's hands?).  And you've gotta love the most rapid and long-distance camera pullback since The Arrival.  But a few eerie images do not a worthwhile - or even half-good, or tolerable - film make, and in the end, The Bone Collector is, well, crap.  I wonder if the novel it's based on (by Jeffery Deaver) is as bad.

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