The Collector (2009).
The Stage.
A safe cracking thief breaks into his employers home while they’re supposed to be away on vacation. Once inside, he realizes someone beat him to the punch, and has turned the home into a labyrinth of deadly traps.
The Review.
This one was brought up by DeVaughn Taylor on our Top 5 Heist Movies episode and the premise had me super intrigued. A cat and mouse game set amongst a house fitted with insane traps? What’s not to like? Well…let me actually answer that oft rhetorical question - the main character, the ugly color scheme, the erratic editing, the direction, the story, and the ending.
Right from the get go I knew this was going to be rough. Thank god I didn’t see this in a theater because the opening title sequence, which appears to be a nod to Se7en, is so unpleasant and the nu-metal techno music so grating that I felt compelled to fast forward through it, which is not normal for me. Then we’re introduced to the color scheme - it’s the drab, green filter that I remember from the Saw films, which feels appropriate, since I remembered DeVaughn telling me that this was intended to be a prequel to Saw, titled The Midnight Man. It’s here we’re introduced to Arkin, a guy who appears to be a general contractor working on a big house in the country. The home is owned by the Chase family. Michael, the patriarch, is a diamond store owner or something and he has a giant diamond inside of a hidden safe on the wall. At one point, Michael’s daughter Hanna tugs on Arkin’s sleeve and asks him to have a tea party with her. Now, any normal contractor is going to say no, but not Arkin…see, we need to have a human side to him. So he sits down and has a tea party with her because he’s got a daughter about her age. This is where the first real failing of the film happens in my opinion. There’s this goofy subplot about Arkin’s ex-wife, who’s in debt to some real bad guys and they’re going to do real bad things if she doesn’t come up with the money by midnight. So he accelerates the job - see, it turns out that Arkin’s been casing this house the whole time, and he’s got a diamond fence just waiting for the big, fat stone. He’s doing it all to save his kid. Giving Arkin a “human quality” that the filmmakers want us to connect with and root for right from the beginning is a dumb move. I think the film would have been much better off if he was single, blew off the kid’s tea party invite, and then redeemed himself by trying to save her from the house.
So he shows up once it’s dark out, just a few hours after he’d originally left there, to break into the house and find it chock full of traps. And I’m not talking about a few bear traps on the floor (although it has those too), I’m talking about elaborate traps that, without a full DIY TV show crew, you’d never be able to assemble by the time Arkin broke in. Then again, as we get to the ending, you’ll realize that the screenwriters didn’t care about that stuff anyway. The rest of the film is an extremely unpleasant “sharp-things-going-through-skin” torture flick that just never feels as impressive as it thinks it is. The thing about extreme gore for an entire movie is that by the time something is supposed to feel ‘big’, it doesn’t because you’re so desensitized to it. It’s designed to be an hour straight rollercoaster of intense dread, but I actually felt bored during the second half. Some of that is due to the incredibly quick editing which does the picture no favors and doesn’t allow us to get a view of the space, and some of it is due to the main character having the personality of a starfish. I’m sure he’s a fine actor, but Josh Stewart looked more bored than I was during this movie.
The End.
Needless to say, I did not like this film and I won’t be seeking out the sequel, The Collection, any time soon. For such a cracking log line, the film is missing the one thing that a premise like this really needs - fun.
