Mark Reviews Movies: COLLECTION

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | September 16, 2021

Unlike so many movies loosely based on real-world issues, Collection at least tells us the alleged importance of its story at the start. It's about debt and, more specifically, about the selling and buying of people's debts by companies that will use some pretty shady tactics in order to make a profit from desperate people. That's the case put forward with some introductory text in this movie, but Todd M. Friedman's screenplay doesn't care about the country's debt crisis any more than it cares about crafting a believable drama or thriller.

The introductory scenes—that opening text and a flash-forward prologue, which basically gives away the broad details of the story's climax—do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of trying to shock us into caring about this tale. We'll ignore both, since the statistics and numbers only tells us there's a problem that's ripe for exploration or exploitation in this story, while the scenes of the plot's climax, before anything resembling a plot even begins, is just one of those clichés that probably needs to disappear from the screenwriting and directorial toolbox. At least here, by the time the climax actually arrives within the movie, there's about as much investment in this story and these characters as there is with the nothing at the start.

We meet longtime friends Brandon (Alex Pettyfer) and Ross (Mike Vogel), who run a debt collection company with a history and reputation for strong-arm tactics, harassment, and other legally gray or outright illegal practices. They're sued by one such target in court, and that trend has become so obvious that the company's insurance broker won't pay for the legal fees. Brandon has to make a huge financial windfall with the next batch of collections, or the company could be looking to go under.

One of the more significant miscalculations on the part of Friedman's script is the way it tries to elicit some kind of sympathy for Brandon. Even after all of that opening text and those scenes from the courtroom explaining the predatory game of debt collection in general and the tactics of which he approves for his own employees, we're still supposed to see Brandon as a figure worthy of some compassion. Friedman goes over-the-top to accomplish this, giving the character, not only a dead wife, but also a dead son, who was killed in a car accident while Brandon was driving.

It also gives him a love interest in the person of Christina (Shakira Barrera), a single mother who works a strip club—where Brandon and Ross just happen to be doing business—to pay the bills. She's only there because her husband (played by Joseph Julian Soria) is in prison, and it doesn't take too long for us to assume that the husband, his involvement in a drug cartel, and the money that was supposed to be supporting Christina and her son are somehow going to be involved in the other side of the plot. The whole thing balances on a series of contrived coincidences that topple over with even the slightest thought.

That other side of the plot has to do with Brandon's big plan to make the company and one lucky collector tens of millions of dollars. He has his collectors—including Ross and newcomer Sean (Jacques Colimon), to whom Brandon feels an almost paternal connection (We have to assume) and who quickly spirals into a cocaine binge—compete for the top of a pyramid of debtors. The last one standing gets half of the big payday.

The point, perhaps, is that each of the major characters on the side of the debt collectors is presented in a somewhat sympathetic way, because they're as much victims of this system as those whom they target. It's a tough sell, of course, especially when Ross' medical issues barely make a dent on the racist, sexist, and generally jerk-ish guy that he is, while Sean's downfall seems designed to put him on a crash course with a destiny that has been pre-ordained by the prologue. Pettyfer plays the grieving and conflicted boss with a vague sense of melancholy, which definitely doesn't provide the character with the level of depth required for us to see past what the movie goes out of its way to affirm as terrible.

Collection wants to have it both ways: to serve as a condemnation of these predatory practices and to make us sympathize with the predators. That goal isn't theoretically bad, but it's a non-starter in this thinly characterized and plotted movie.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products