The Bone Collector is a crime thriller starring Denzel Washington, Angelina Jolie, Ed O'Neill, Michael Rooker, Leland Orser, Queen Latifah, and Luis Guzman. It's based on a novel by Jeffery Deaver that I actually read!
Lincoln Rhyme (Washington) is a forensics expert in New York who has an unfortunate accident and winds up quadriplegic; only his head and one finger work anymore. He gets round-the-clock care courtesy of the NYPD because he was injured on the job (I rather suspect that's an overly generous depiction, but who knows) and has a live-in carer, Thelma (Queen Latifah). And then one day an Important Rich Guy (Gary Swanson) turns up dead, his wife (Olivia Birkelund) is kidnapped, and Rhyme recruits a singularly un-ambitious beat cop named Amelia (Jolie) to be his eyes and legs out in the word (she has an instinct for collecting evidence).
The killer escalates, kidnapping and killing several other people while Amelia and Lincoln try, largely unsuccessfully, to keep up (seriously, their track record in this movie is not great, which I guess is the danger of having your heroes be forensic investigators - if they're involved then there probably isn't a chance of saving someone), until it's revealed that the killer is really...Richard (Orser), the guy that calibrates Lincoln's machines! He has his reasons, but they get pretty glossed over. He's got a pretty good kill count by the end, though - four victims in the movie, five or so that happened before the events of the movie that the cops didn't forensics hard enough, Thelma, and the dumb police captain (Rooker) who's just there as a stumbling block.
As is common of adaptations, there's a lot missing from the book and some of it was probably better included. Lincoln is (very reasonably, in my opinion) making preparations to die rather than risking his increasingly severe seizures putting him into a vegetative state, and in the movie Amelia just kind of says "yeah, that's your choice." In the book, she takes it as a big moral affront (I think there's some Catholic BS involved, but it's been a long time since I read it) and she actually arrests the doctor who's helping Lincoln, and then winds up buried alive by the killer and comes to understand wanting to die quickly rather than slowly and helplessly. And I could swear the scene where she arrests him was in the movie, but it's not. Likewise, she gets a lot more character development and we learn more about why she's closed off from others.
This movie was one of many Silence of the Lambs copycats involving a female agent working with a brilliant partner who can't do their own legwork for whatever reason (see also: Copycat). It's not bad, but the strength of the movie is the performances - Washington and Jolie for sure, but also Luis Guzman as Lincoln's computer genius, Queen Latifah, and even Leland Orser for the brief period he gets to be crazy and desperate. The pacing is weird and frankly the whole movie feels rushed, and I think we could have done with a little more room to breathe on why the killer cares so much. I definitely think the subplot with Lincoln's suicidal ideation and his eventual decision not to die (which, in the book, is because he's interested in his work again and wants to keep working with Amelia, while here it's a more general zest for life) should have been included, because it gives both Lincoln and Amelia an arc.
All in all, though, it's an enjoyable enough thriller if you liked CSI or Criminal Minds, which I did.
My Grade: C+
Rewatch Value: Medium-high
Next up: Cape Fear
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