The Tax Collector
Director David Ayer returns from his directorial anguish after 2016's Suicide Squad and 2017's Bright with a far more intimate and independent production, as well as reteaming with actor Shia LaBeouf after Fury in 2014. However, his latest feature The Tax Collector is an undesirable dud.
It is clear, from the get-go, that Ayer is back where he belongs, making intimately harsh and brutal independent thrillers. However, this is a far cry from entities such as End of Watch, Harsh Times and Street Kings. The biggest issue Ayer's film has is a lack of visual style or aesthetic. To put it simply, The Tax Collector is incredibly bland and visually mute from cinematographer Salvatore Totino. Not contextually so, either, as with the likes of End of Watch, Ayer made a conscious and ambitious decision to elevate the mundane, yet here, the result is just conventional and merely bland. Out of its almost two hour running time, there is one scene in which Ayer injects visual flavour, but as soon as the viewers' eyes adjust to the screen, it is over in a flash.
That being said, the visual aesthetic is just one disappointing element. The greatest sin provoked by Ayer is having such a hollow, empty and meaningless plot. Nothing throughout the film is justified and, in its place, is an excessive nature to exploit any and all imaginable horror for provocation, rather than the feature crafting organic, emotional thematic discourse. The screenplay is so paper-thin and flat, it is almost unbelievable that this is considered a narrative at all.
The pacing and depth are far too excessive and opaque for the film to either grapple with the horror on screen or be drawn into this world. Bobby Soto as David leads the way in depth, not because the screenplay affords the actor such but due to the film solely spending more of the plot regarding his arc. Even then the film drives into a ditch with its quintessential derivative and conventional plot beats. Again, it is all too mundane and dull for the audience to care. Random and under fleshed-out plot points are recurring; they craft an incredibly flat fallout regarding both potentially emotionally tense scenes, specifically regarding David's family.
To make matters worse, the audience then has the performance of Shia LaBeouf to contend with. Many witnessing this performance are going to label this as brown-face and, to that degree, the controversy is much deserved. The film further makes matters worse by not providing substantial depth to quantify if LaBeouf's Creeper is in fact from Latino heritage or, as the film very faintly suggests, he is enamoured with David and what his life entails. Then again, nothing is on offer here in terms of depth to understand Creeper, his background, his motives or even an ounce of his personality. Nevertheless, LaBeouf will come under strict fire here. Yet, it should be noted that Ayer is not innocent in his partaking; this is not only naivety from a cultural standpoint but a sheer lack of awareness regarding his terrible screenplay.
Excessiveness and ignorance do not begin to describe this disaster from David Ayer. What makes The Tax Collector even more disappointing is the fact that Ayer has found a balance between nuance and excessiveness before. He has shown the brutality of life and paralleled it with a redeeming and justified thematic weight with refinement. However, here it would seem that Ayer is wholly engulfed by his sadism from the studio system and results in an impertinent mess.
