Movie Review: The Tax Collector

 

Cue up the shitty Bon Jovi song and that rambling Matthew McConaughey voiceover from the Lincoln commercial because David Ayer has come home!!! After venturing out of his established artistic realm to helm a WWII film (Fury) and a couple of profitable yet widely maligned blockbusters (Suicide Squad, Bright), the veteran writer/director has returned to the LA criminal underworld that granted him those opportunities to tackle bigger projects. With The Tax Collector, Ayer demonstrates that he had no problem getting back into his gritty grove despite his extended absence from this corner of cinema.  

There shouldn't be any confusion about what type of movie The Tax Collector is. Ayer has made a name for himself telling stories about morally conflicted criminals that try to keep their professional lives separate from their personal and learn in the most brutal way imaginable that this dream of a double life can't be sustained forever. Here, that criminal with a conscience is David Cuevas (Bobby Soto in a meditative yet explosive breakout performance)-the crown prince of a respected LA crime family who spends his days collecting money from the other gangs that operate on his family's turf with his best friend/top enforcer (the always committed Shia LaBeouf) before returning home to live a blissful domestic life with his wife (Cinthya Carmona) and kids at night. This comfortable, delicate dance between worlds is suddenly interrupted when a powerful former rival (Jose Martin) of his family returns from Mexico and offers to form a partnership-which David declines and quickly leads to a vicious war that threatens to upend his entire existence.

What makes Ayer's take on a straightforward crime story like this effective is the unflinching way he goes about telling it. Everything he does here from the dialogue to how these characters react when the shit hits the fan is predicated on being as naturalistic as possible, which opens the door for a streamlined exploration of the consequences that come with embracing this lifestyle. Underneath the money, power and false sense of security that comes with it is a promise that the vicious cycle of violence that you've thrived off for so long will eventually come for your head. Unspeakable acts of brutality will be committed against you and your family and when the reign of terror ends, you'll either be in the ground or left with a level of trauma that can never be shaken. While this approach results in a unapologetically grisly film that isn't always easy to watch, this emphasis on the visceral pain that a life of crime comes with is what makes Ayer's work in this genre space so uniquely raw and compelling.

Is The Tax Collector on the level of Training Day, End of Watch or even Sabotage? Not quite. The script could've done a better job with developing David's relationships, the acting ensemble behind Soto and LaBeouf isn't notably great and despite a clever final scene reveal, the ending is a bit too rushed. Still, it was reassuring to see that Ayer can still seamlessly churn out this type of movie after a pretty long lay off and I'm pretty confident that his next project will end up being better. 

Grade: B