Mark Reviews Movies: THE TAX COLLECTOR

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 6, 2020

"This is a good man," a gang leader says about the protagonist of The Tax Collector. It's easy to understand why this man would think that, given the relative "goodness" of the protagonist in his mind. Our main character did, after all, stop some of his own gang from murdering a member of the other gang, who only ended up being beaten and tortured. In this world, good and bad are relative concepts, and we can accept that as the "rules," if you will, or central theme of a story.

The issue, though, is that writer/director David Ayer seems to believe that David (Bobby Soto), the eponymous "tax" collector for an imprisoned crime lord, is a good man—not relatively speaking or in some comparative analysis, but just as a fact under these specific or any other circumstances. The movie shows otherwise, and even when Ayer tries to make the argument that David is good, the rationale is both poorly established and unconvincingly argued. We've seen too much of this man—his actions and his character—even to consider otherwise.

When we first meet David, he seems fairly ordinary. He loves his wife Alexis (Cinthya Carmona), has two kids, and is preparing for the quinceañera of his sister-in-law's daughter. David leaves the house, filled with happiness and playful bickering, to his job at the auto shop he owns. That's when the façade of the ordinary life drops.

We're introduced to his real work. His friend and right-hand man Creeper (Shia LaBeouf, convincing in a role that has been questionably cast) arrives, packing a pistol for an upcoming meeting. Some local drug dealers have come to pay their share of the profits to Bobby's boss, a gang leader currently running the operation from prison. The boss is Wizard, whose identity is a dual mystery—both for the actor playing him, which one couldn't and has no reason to see coming, and his relationship to at least one other character in this story, which is pretty obvious almost immediately but doesn't matter in the slightest by the time it's revealed.

Ayer spends a lot of time showing David in his element, going around town to collect the "taxes" owed to Wizard. We never really learn why anyone has to pay this crime lord, except that he's a powerful man, which just makes him—and, by extension, everyone else working for him, including David—just look like extorting, murderous bullies. If that's the setup, establishing our protagonist and those in his vicinity as terrible people even within this terrible world of criminality, that would fine. During a montage in which David explains what he does and, more importantly, how he reacts when people aren't able to pay their fees, he explains how he has seen people being and ordered people to be beaten, tortured, and killed in grisly ways.

The reflexive response to all of this—what David explains, as well as how we see him and Creeper going about their gig—is that our protagonist is far from any kind of hero. He is, at best, a hypocrite—championing his religious faith over Creeper's nihilism and being devoted to his family while likely destroying so many other—or, at worst, some kind of opportunistic, sociopathic leech of pain and misery.

Ayer, though, clearly wants to redeem this man or, possibly, show us that there actually is good beneath the surface of this character, whose personality and behavior are defined by his environment. To cut to the point, the filmmaker's efforts to reform this character don't work. On top of that, Ayer has to do a lot of contriving and cliché-building to arrive at even the possibility of this character's relative redemption.

The central plot, arriving after plenty of David and Creeper going about their routine and having some loaded discussions about human nature, has an upstart gang leader, played by rapper Conejo (as a character named after him), trying to take over Wizard's operation. If the status quo of Wizard's crew is really bad, this new guy is really, really bad. We know this, not only because he tortures his victims for pleasure, but also because he partakes in literal human sacrifice.

As for the remainder of the story, it's shallow and predictable. David has to protect his family from the new threat, and there's a bunch of bloody action sequences as the turf war instantly escalates (The funniest bit has David remembering a short and seemingly pointless scene of him learning martial arts in the middle of a fight). Whatever point The Tax Collector might be trying to make about the main character is as simplistic and unpersuasive as the rushed, formulaic third act.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the DVD

Buy the Blu-ray