The Bone Collector

Directed by Phillip Noyce
A Universal release

by Cindy Fuchs

The Bone Collector gives you most everything you need to know during its first four minutes, half of which is the credits sequence, hyper-scratchy and slashy-looking, generically stylish. You see police stills of carved-up bodies, New York buildings, cops toasting each other for triumphant photo-ops, newspaper headlines, and assorted true-crime titles, all ascribed to the name of Lincoln Rhyme. You’re watching all this and maybe you’re trying to pick out the clues that will help you follow, if not actually solve, the upcoming mystery. You find yourself distracted, and you’re thinking, what a great, ridiculous name for a heroic crime fighter, Lincoln Rhyme.

Phillip Noyce’s thriller is full of such distractions, all working double-time to dress up its prosaic plot: cop vs. psycho killer. But Linc isn’t just a brilliant, cranky and prolific author. He’s an ex-New York City forensics detective, and a paraplegic following an on-the-job accident (related via a bad-dream flashback, from which he wakes in the expected sweat). And no surprise, he’s not your average paraplegic. He’s played by Denzel Washington, which, let’s face it, is likely the reason you’re here. His apartment is fully equipped (think Sigourney Weaver in Copycat) with the latest in voice-activated computer appliances (adjustable bed, zoomable monitors, 3-D chess games).

And his adversary isn’t just any serial killer. He’s a manipulative mass of malevolence who ingeniously leaves obscure clues at crime scenes — iron bolts with traces of asbestos, scraps of really old paper, ancient subway maps, bits of bone and rat hair — for Linc to interpret in bizarre and unbelievable ways. True to formula, the guy has a grudge against Linc, and of course you only see him in masks or shadows as he picks up his victims in his skulking and lurching yellow cab, thus pressing the familiar "worst nightmare" button for any urban dweller. (Question: Will this movie do for taxis what Jaws did for the water?)

Then there’s the requisite third element, the gifted rookie who also happens to be beautiful (a child model, for pete’s sake) and deeply troubled (she’s become a cop to somehow assuage her pain over her suicidal cop-dad). Meet Amelia (Angelina Jolie), a resourceful, ornery beat cop with an "instinct" for forensics. Initially resisting her apparent calling, Amelia soon finds herself wired to Linc and exploring drippy-noir murder sites, where she sees bodies in all manners of grisly discombobulation while searching for evidence ("working the grid," as they say in the Crime Scene biz). She’s so good at it and so pissed off at the world that Linc convinces her that she must take the case in order to: a) get revenge for the corpses that so appall her, and b) stop the insanity.

Together, Linc and Amelia fight the usual ignorant hard-ass captain (Michael Rooker) with help from the usual lab-team ace (Luis Guzman) and the usual decent but always-a-step-behind detectives (Ed O’Neill and Mike McGlone), one of whom might (as usual) be a suspect. Generic to its core, The Bone Collector can’t surmount its built-in predictability: The characters you like are appropriate to like, characters you expect to die do so in appropriately horrific ways, and the showdown between Linc and the killer delivers the perfect mix of dread, action (quite inventively, considering Linc’s immobility) and cathartically bloody violence.

Ironically, what would seem the film’s cheesiest distraction — the sneaking romance between Linc and Amelia — is its most fascinating aspect, if only because it’s so skillfully executed by its players. Inevitably, the relationship gives them both what they so desperately need, he being suicidal (how conveniently like her father, so she can revisit old bullshit) and she being commitment-phobic. It’s the very small gestures that make any of this begin to work. After Amelia witnesses a particularly harrowing seizure, she approaches Linc’s dozing form to touch his tracheotomy scar and then his fingers. He wakes, for once not from a nightmare, and they share a painfully delicate moment, laced with awkward joking and real affection. And it’s hardly distracting at all.