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USA 1999
Directed by
Phillip Noyce
99 minutes
Rated M

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
2 stars

The Bone Collector

As he demonstrated with Sliver (1993) Australian director Philip Noyce is not well suited to Hollywood multiplex fare. With The Bone Collector, a David Fincher wannabe serial killer thriller he drives the point home.  Not that he can be held responsible for everything - the at times lame, at times absurd script and the woeful casting make major contributions to this being a turkey. But for what he can the news is not good.

Denzel Washington plays Lincoln Rhyme, a brilliant maverick NYPD detective who has been comprehensively paralyzed by a falling beam while investigating a murder scene.  As a result he is bed-ridden, his world reduced to a computer screen and mouse and some kind of mouth-operated remote control. Unsurprisingly he wants to terminate his life. Things take a turn for the better however when cop-on-the-beat Amelia Donaghy (Angelina Jolie) discovers a grisly high profile murder.  Asked to help with the investigation Rhyme, recognizing the presence of a psycho with a taste for goading the police with cryptic clues about his next murder, requests that Amelia be his woman in the field as he tries to catch the killer.

This scenario might have worked on paper but on screen it is border line ridiculous and gets more so as the movie progresses.  Not only has Rhyme got an improbably prodigious ability to decipher the killer’s clues but he has a raft of bods with computers in his amazingly large apartment to expedite his every instruction and is connected by wireless to Amelia, his alter ego, who on his encouraging instructions creeps around rat-infested abandoned warehouses at night trying to corner the killer. 

If few people will find Jolie a likely beat cop, Washington, eminently watchable as he always is, is not much more plausible as the paralyzed prodigy.  An equally poorly cast Luis Guzman plays a clichéd assistant to Rhyme and Michael Rooker is a clichéd arrogantly inept department chief whilst Queen Latifah is the only somewhat fresh note as Rhymes tough-assed carer.

If the investigation unfolds with improbable expedition the identification of the killer comes out of nowhere and even worse initiates a very silly tussle that sees the bed-ridden Rhyme the winner.  And if that wasn’t enough the film ends with that most clichéd of finales, the Xmas get together (Thanksgiving often serves the sentimental purpose as well) with Jolie in a fetching low cut black number and Rhyme in black tie presiding over all, revitalized by the power of Amelia’s love, represented by Noyce in a ghastly earlier scene in which Amelia appears to be masturbating his finger.

The Bone Collector is an embarrassment for all concerned.

 

 

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