Thriller Leaves Too Much To Chew On
The Age
Thursday November 18, 1999
A BEAM of light piercing the gloom; it's a very '90s thing, a law enforcement officer and her high-powered torch, illuminating a city's dark places. Above all, think of agent Scully in The X Files, Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs; iconic women with torches, going boldly where no ordinary person would care to go. Into the shadows.
Amelia Donaghy (Angelina Jolie) in Phillip Noyce's The Bone Collector joins the sisterhood of light bearers. She's a New York cop who shows considerable initiative at a gruesome crime scene, protecting its integrity and photographing the clues the killer has left. So, instead of the transfer she wants, she is singled out to assist on the case.
Denzel Washington plays Lincoln Rhyme, a forensic expert who is impressed by her initiative and her instincts and insists on working with her, and ensuring that she is first on the killer's subsequent crime scenes. Rhyme and Donaghy, however, don't get on at first; he is high-handed, she is uncooperative. Slowly they begin to appreciate each other's qualities.
There's a Rear Window element here. Rhyme, who became a quadriplegic after a crime scene accident, is the James Stewart figure, confined to one place; Donaghy, a feisty young cop with an instinct for forensic work, is the Grace Kelly figure who goes searching for evidence and putting herself at risk, descending into the bowels of old New York to look for bodies and clues.
They keep in contact by mobile phone. Rhyme, who can move an index finger, has an extensive bank of computers and voice-activated technology to help him do his job.
Their task is to interpret the clues that a cruel and devious killer is leaving at crime scenes; sometimes he even hints at what's going to happen next. It's like a twisted treasure hunt. Understand the pattern. Stop him from killing again. Maybe, even save a life. The usual stuff.
We know, from the outset, that the serial killer is a taxi driver whose victims are his fares. The clues he leaves seem to indicate an obsession with turn-of-the-century New York. And he seems to know a bit about forensics.
In some ways, the predictability of these elements is the point; it's a genre that needs to combine familiar elements with new twists.
David Fincher's Seven, with its killer obsessed with creating terrible tableaux of the seven deadly sins, is the model '90s serial killer movie - stylish, gruesome, dark, set in a city of perpetual rain, with a murderer obsessively creating grim tableaux of the seven deadly sins. A killer who gets to know his pursuers and plays with their expectations. A mismatched pair of cops (one old, one young) who don't get on at first. There's even a plot twist in The Bone Collector (to do with identifying finger prints) that is identical to one that takes place in Seven.
Noyce seems to have decided to go with grisly detail, yet play down suspense; there's sometimes a listless pace to scenes, a surprising lack of tension at key moments. The relationship between Donaghy and Rhyme is important (and potentially interesting), but the actors have to work against some clunky, obvious dialogue and unnecessary detail (stuff about Donaghy's past is annoying and redundant).
Washington does his best with Rhyme, while Jolie is particularly good. She has an appealing weariness, a kind of grimly determined integrity. Her beauty never gets in the way of the role; she shrugs it off effortlessly.
But things really fall apart in the final stages of the film, as the killer is revealed, there's a nasty confrontation and then a bizarrely chirpy resolution. At this point, The Bone Collector moves from psychological thriller to absurdity.
© 1999 The Age