Spoiler Alert!
Lincoln Rhyme is a living legend among the NYPD elite, and it’s a wonder he’s still living. The brilliant homicide detective-slash-criminologist has written the book – several in fact – on investigating crime, but since a tragic accident left him quadriplegic and bed-ridden he has lost the will to live. How can he do what he was born to when, along with being isolated, his colleagues think he’s more of a washed-up celebrity then the force of nature he was? A new serial killer is prowling the streets. When Rhyme is consulted on the crime scene photos, he sees a way to work from home: by letting the photographer, rookie Amelia Donaghy, be his eyes-and-ears on the ground. With his almost-supernatural ability to deduce and the cop’s instincts she inherited from her father, the duo grind the case out together but not quickly enough to save this murderer’s victims from the tauntingly-complex time-sensitive contraptions he has them hooked up to. Rhyme and Donaghy find out the killer is using a crime novel as his template and with the last murder in the book completed, he turns his attention to Rhyme. Turns out, the killer is not only one of Rhyme’s medical orderlies but a corrupt ex-cop who Lincoln slandered in one of his true-crime books, who was then “used as a human toilet” in prison and released with a taste for elaborately-plotted vengeance. How will Lincoln get himself out of this jam? Can he count on the new friends he made along the way? Will their kindness inspire a new joie-de-vivre in this crippled husk of a man? Am I digging for character depth too deeply in a movie where the lead actor got to lie down on a bed for ninety-nine percent of the time?
The Bone Collector comes from a nice, stale time of filmmaking in the late-90s/early-2000s where diabolical serial killers were as common in major metropolitan areas as seagulls by the coast. Let’s see how many of these movies I can rattle off: Seven; Kiss the Girls; Copycat; Taking Lives; The Crimson Rivers; Hannibal; Along Came a Spider; Crimson Rivers 2… not even closed cases are sequel-safe! The Bone Collector never had a sequel but then again it never convinced me it had its own unique, tangible reason for existence in the first place. As a MONEY-MAKING ENTERPRISE, however, it’s certainly one Hell of a time-capsule: Denzel Washington before he won his Oscar, in what has to be his easiest payday before greedily throwing his clout around; Angelina Jolie right around the time she won her Oscar (remember that?), and before she became the philanthropic Influencer and Marvel girl she is now; gratuitous scenes of captors and their tormentors going through the motions in a very pre-Saw implied-violence sort of way; a disabled hero who is helped more in the entire movie by his way-too-advanced-for-its-time computer then any single character; and comedy relief from Luis Guzman. Luis Guzman! You’ll notice a handful of the other actors too, and it becomes easy to believe how little things can change over time except age and beauty. Michael Rooker is still playing the tough guy. Ed O’Neill is still who you call when you can’t get John Goodman. And Guzman still hasn’t helmed his own Puerto Rican Autumn in New York. Like every audio/visual-based undertaking I’ve obligated to recently its plot is quite conveniently-generic and if you are able to place it within the history of the genre (as I was unable not to do, film school training be-damned) then the identity of the villain is no surprise. Leland Orser must have the most memorable reactions to anything, ever. I wonder how he responds to burnt toast. “OH MAH GAAAWWDDD! YOU FUCK!” This guy puts the character in character actor and as soon as he shows up he is obviously the killer.
There is a primetime network series on right now called Lincoln Rhyme, with its first season purportedly an adaptation of the original Bone Collector novel. Just for reference, the “Hannibal” show – regardless of my opinion of it as a whole, which is mediocre – has set the standard now for slow roll-out of fan service over years instead of, say, remaking The Silence of the Lambs in their first season. In the current TV landscape, Lincoln Rhyme just looks like a shameless mid-season cash grab hitting for the lowest-common denominator by capitalizing on this film adaptation, which is now twenty-years-old and which no one under thirty would bother with unless they saw the original when they were a kid because everyone at school would whisper about how gruesome it was and how THEIR parents let THEM watch it and there was tons of gore and sex and tiddies and people getting their arms and legs sawed off and then you somehow convince your parents to rent it for themselves and then you watch it by yourself while they’re at work and it has NONE of the things your friends told you it did and then you are disappointed. Like what totally didn’t happen to me….
//jf 2.12.20
theory of a daskeman 