The Bone Collector (1999)

If there has never been a porn parody, I'm on it.

Before a household movie night at the weekend, I hadn't watched The Bone Collector in perhaps ten years. Though I know it well, as it was one of the first movies I caught on TV that my mum actually allowed me to buy on VHS, even though I was several years younger than the rating demanded.  A thirteen-year-old me thought it was a pretty cool movie with a good crime mystery to it. A withered and haggard twenty-eight-year-old me thought it was a silly, nonsensical and hilariously '90s movie that was moth-eaten in so many places, I couldn't believe I never noticed its threadbare appearance before.

I didn't become an NYC cop to monitor
glory holes.

The movie opens (after the flashy and entirely too-long credit sequence) to an able-bodied Lincoln Rhyme (Denzel Washington) on assignment to retrieve the corpse of a fellow police officer who has died on the job. Some big heavy object comes hurtling at Washington out of nowhere and we cut to him waking up, in his luxurious apartment, being stared at by a falcon on the windowsill. If it sounds like this falcon, who appears numerous times, will have any relevance, you are already giving this movie far too much credit. Rhyme, it transpires, is a top forensic mind who continues on full pay as a detective from the confines of his home hospital bed, which is linked up to all the best and bulkiest gadgets that the '90s could muster. His friend/nurse is Thelma, played endearingly by Queen Latifah, and she is there to CPR him out of seizures and tell meddling police officers to fuck off.

We then meet Amelia Donaghy (Angelina Jolie), who a nicely succinct scene tells us suffers insomnia and cannot bring herself to commit to a relationship. It seems the only thing that drives her in life is her job as an NYPD cop. Now lemme just stop it right there and say, "Kid -- does this seem familiar to you?" If it's not already ringing bells, the rest of the movie will beat you over the head with how much it wants to be Silence of the Lambs. This may be too early to outline the entire thing, but bear with me. The Bone Collector, in a nutshell, involves a young female law enforcer with trauma in her past, who somehow hooks up with a restrained genius that will help her catch a serial killer, and perhaps alleviate her past horrors by saving the lives of innocent strangers. There is also a sexual undertone to the relationship between the cop and the genius. When rewatching this movie, I took the director for some naive newcomer whose ambitiousness was commendable, but was let down by material not even fit to polish Silence's good bag and cheap shoes. It was only upon researching that I realised Phillip Noyce was at the helm: by 1999 he was a veteran filmmaker, and had turned out some decent thrillers, including Dead Calm, which I really enjoyed. Perhaps Noyce was feeling lazy, or just taking easy jobs.

Amelia takes a call on the job one day, to be met at the shabby railway tracks by a young street kid, who alerts her to the half-buried body of a man. She spots what appears to be neatly laid-out clues from the perp, and has the balls to run at an oncoming train with her flashlight in an attempt to preserve the evidence. Now don't ask me how the hell it happens, but this incident somehow results in her showing up with colleagues at Rhyme's apartment in no time, and suddenly she is on the case. Rhyme apparently takes a liking to Amelia's tenacity and constantly teary eyes, and begins to read her for filth in the fashion of the 'magical negro' stereotype; note that this is also how he solves crimes. Throughout the movie, he spouts out random words and numbers in a way that clearly make sense to him, but the visuals present it as utterly random, and there is no way the audience can follow Rhyme with his logic like they should, and like other, better productions would allow them to. We are never sure where his instincts or logic come from, and by the time all the loose ends have been supposedly tied up, the way Rhyme arrives at what turn out to be correct conclusions never makes any goddamn sense. 

Their initial reaction to the script.

And that's not through lack of trying to help the audience make sense of it all. It's just that the writer and director clearly thought that their audience would be entirely braindead and unable to understand the basics, let alone the more integral plot points. A sequence towards the end demonstrates this, in which Jolie comes across the final clue and adopts the methods of thinking that Rhyme has impressed upon her throughout the story. She stares fixedly at the number of an abandoned train carriage, while muttering, "Help me Rhyme, help me!" and the visuals do some silly sepia montage of different places she might have seen the number. Now these visuals (let's just forget the stupid dialogue ever happened) could have worked in a far less cheesy way had the director established this visual theme earlier on. As I mentioned, the camera often just sits, looking at Rhyme along with his colleagues, waiting for him to spout his random wisdom, and when he does, everyone springs into action. The earlier scenes of his thinking and deducing could have also had these sepia montages, and then the whole thread of Rhyme teaching Donaghy to be a good detective could have felt fluent and deserved. Instead, it just jumps out of nowhere and seems laughable. It is topped when she finally figures the clue out, and exclaims, "He's going to kill Rhyme!", as if the visuals hadn't just given us that information on a silver platter. 

So the plot... well, the man buried by the train tracks turns out to be a man who we earlier saw hailing a cab with his wife from an airport, but being accosted by the driver. His wife is still missing. Later one or two totally unimportant and unestablished characters are pounced upon by some dude in a balaclava, and each time, he leaves ridiculous clues for the police to find. I guess the conspicuousness of the clues doesn't matter though, as the clues themselves make no fucking sense anyhow, and if it weren't for Rhyme's magical omniscience, they would never be solved by anyone.

Long story short, some dickhead is recreating murders from some old crime novel, which Amelia finds, and thankfully doesn't have to read, as all the important points are illustrated -- how convenient. Given the standard of dialogue, I'm almost surprised she doesn't blurt out, "The killer is copying this book!" in the style of "It's goblin spelled backwards!" The movie tries weakly to imply that one of Rhyme's many professional associates is the culprit, focusing mainly on the flamboyant Latino who makes the odd joke.

I'm your number one fan!

Since we're here, we may as well talk about the conclusion of this stupid movie. No, the killer isn't Manny or whatever his stereotypical Mexican name was; it's Richard, the geek who hovers in the background, tuning up Rhyme's heart monitors or some shit. Richard gives the silliest fucking 'culprit spills the tea' scene I have ever seen. It would seem that two or three brief flashes in this movie are meant to imply that at some point, a few cops were put away for some sort of corrupt act, although it is never elaborated upon. Turns out - and you can thank the clunky dialogue for me knowing this - that Richard was one of the cops incriminated by some paper or other that Rhyme wrote, and so after being donut-punched in federal for six years, he spent another two learning how to tweak crappy late-'90s PC monitors in order to get to kill Lincoln Rhyme. Yeah, that doesn't sound like a monumental waste of time and energy.

And if you thought that was crazy, you ought to hear the rest. Rhyme's nearest and dearest know that he fears a seizure that would vegetate him, and so has suicide plans in place. Knowing that what he dreads most is becoming a "vegetable", Richard sets upon him, asking him what sort of vegetable he wants to be. A carrot or a zucchini. Christ, way to take the seriousness out of a scene! Well thankfully, Rhyme's state of the art hospital bed just happens to have an emergency collapse mode -- cos why wouldn't that be useful in a medical situation? -- and he traps Richard's fingers in the frame, before biting his neck and dragging him along like a limp-limbed hyena. It is truly funny, and takes all the wind out of the drama's sails. 

Nothing makes sense in this picture. The killer's motives are stupid, the clues are ludicrous, and the implications of unfinished plot threads are worse. What of Amelia's boyfriend? Does she learn through her struggles to commit to a relationship? I dunno, but she certainly became more comfortable with molesting comatose cripples. Does Lincoln learn to value life more? Apparently, but it's only so that the movie can end on the cheesiest, stupidest Christmas ending I ever fucking saw. Amelia's depression and old traumas are only ever alluded to, yet her whole character seems to hang on them. Is she now at peace with her father's suicide, and can she go forward in life? God knows, but she looks hot in a slinky black dress while putting presents under Rhyme's tree. 

So glad we got over our individual traumas,
thanks to the magic of crime-solving
 and Christmas.

And if all of this didn't seem vapid and tone-deaf enough, guess what song they chose for the closing credits? Don't Give Up by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush! The musical tone and the themes of the song only fit this movie in the loosest sense, and it reminds me of those god-awful slow, belting versions of songs that Celine Dion or whoever would sing at the end of '90s Disney movies. There is an old TV movie from about the same time called Perfect Body, starring former Power Ranger Amy Jo Johnson, about a gymnast training to Olympic standard, who develops an eating disorder. After all the trouble and trauma this causes her, the final scene is of the girl in a dimly-lit gym, once again mounting the horse, while Don't Give Up plays softly in the background. That movie uses the song perfectly, but The Bone Collector left me baffled with this choice.

Roger Ebert once said that the cast of The Bone Collector was too good for the material, and now I absolutely get what he was saying. I watched this with five or six people, all of whom recognised some of the character actors. This movie strikes me as a strictly Paycheck Picture. I'm sure it was largely forgotten six months after its release, and if not for the odd TV rerun, it would be a footnote on many successful actors' resumes.