The Bone Collector
Cliché Alert! Cliché Alert!
One one hand, I suppose, you have to hand it to The Bone Collector for having a hero with a disability — several disabilities, in fact. Denzel Washington plays Lincoln Rhyme (rhymes with crime), a New York City police detective who has quadriplegia, massive, life-threatening seizures, and depression. Rhyme can still fight crime from his apartment, using his forensic and analytical abilities to solve murders. However, this being a movie, Rhyme has lots of help: unlimited health insurance, a fancy New York apartment with more forensic tools than the Bat Cave, 24-hour nursing care, and millions of dollars worth of assistive technology (literally) at his fingertips. Hollywood obviously still has a long way to go in portraying the reality of people with disabilities.
Unfortunately, the glamorous treatment of disability in The Bone Collector is the only real reason to see it. The Bone Collector is nothing more than a sad, feeble attempt to recapture the past glories of the serial-killer genre. It accomplishes nothing more than to remind us of how well done some of those movies were by comparison.
The Bone Collector aspires to be Seven, or The Silence of the Lambs, and fails utterly. Both Seven and The Silence of the Lambs had innovative screenplays that rejected the clichés rampant in standard, generic Hollywood thrillers. The Bone Collector doesn’t reject these clichés; it embraces them like a long-lost millionaire uncle.
The Bone Collector is not the worst movie of 1999, but it is clearly the least original. The plot, which involves Denzel directing the investigation of the serial killer by remote control through rookie cop Angelina Jolie, is a direct rip-off of the underrated 1995 film Copycat, where an agoraphobic Sigourney Weaver directed the efforts of Holly Hunter’s detective. But where Copycat was smart and original, The Bone Collector is dumb and derivative. If you don’t mind movies that throw in tired, worn, overused bits like pigheaded police captains or the Law of Economy of Characters or Ed O’Neill or an unlikely romance between the male and female leads or killers who tell the hero their evil plans before they try to kill him, you’ll probably enjoy the heck out of The Bone Collector. However, if you’ve seen more than one movie in your life, you won’t.
The one plus to The Bone Collector is the overall excellence of the casting. It’s a treat, for example, to see Queen Latifah in a movie where she doesn’t get killed in the first reel. (Latifah plays Denzel’s attendant, who apparently is capable of working three shifts a day without getting tired.) Luis Guzman is a hoot as the wisecracking forensics cop, and even Ed O’Neill doesn’t embarrass himself too badly as Denzel’s best cop friend. Denzel, of course, is fabulous, although one wishes again that he could get a role where he’s neither a cop or an icon of the civil rights movement. Only the orthodontically perfect Angelina Jolie strikes a false note as the whiny girl cop who must crawl around the sewers and basements of New York with Denzel directing her by remote control.
The Bone Collector didn’t garner any Academy Award nominations, although Jolie got one for Girl, Interrupted and Washington got one for The Hurricane. Interestingly enough, every year since Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man in 1989, at least one Best Actor nomination has gone to an actor playing a person with a disability (Richard Farnsworth in The Straight Story this year, for one) — and in every year but two, that actor has taken home the Oscar. (Jeremy Irons’s portrayal of Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune beat out Robert DeNiro’s encephalitis patient in Awakenings in 1991, and Roberto Begnini beat out Tom Hanks’s portrayal of an infantry captain with post-traumatic stress disorder in Saving Private Ryan last year.) Jolie (who played a person with a disability in Girl, Interrupted) and Washington may very well take home Oscar gold this month, but they had better hope that the Academy members either didn’t catch The Bone Collector or are generous enough not to hold that against them.