ENTERTAINING but terminally dopey, “The Bone Collector” is yet another grisly movie about a devious serial killer – pursued in this case by a brilliant quadriplegic criminologist working with the NYPD’s most beautiful officer.
Denzel Washington plays Lincoln Rhyme, an overbearing grouch confined to a bed in his SoHo loft after his spinal cord is severed in a nasty crime-scene accident. He can move one finger, which he uses to operate an impressive array of computers to track down a homicidal taxi driver who, in the film’s opening and scariest sequence, abducts a middle-aged couple from an airport.
When the husband’s mutilated body turns up at an underpass, Rhyme is impressed with the young patrolwoman who stops a speeding Amtrak train to collect evidence – just like Rhyme suggests in the NYPD training manual he wrote.
“I’d say you have a natural instinct for forensics,” Rhyme tells police Officer Amelia Donaghy (a horribly miscast Angelina Jolie), a former fashion model who he’s decided is the only member of the 38,000-member NYPD who can do his legwork. When she resists (“Do you think your condition gives you the right to push people around?” she asks Rhyme), she’s strong-armed into working the case under threat of dismissal.
It turns out the killer – a la “Seven” – is deliberately leaving obscure clues leading to his victims and challenging Rhyme to save them. Through a mind-boggling series of deductions, Rhyme is somehow able to figure out the woman abducted from the airport has been placed in a steampipe at a Wall Street intersection that will erupt at precisely 4 p.m.
Director Phillip Noyce generates considerable suspense, expertly using camera angles and some interesting locations, including an abandoned, turn-of-the-century slaughterhouse in Greenwich Village and a closed subway station near the Battery.
But for every smart scene, there’s something as ridiculous as the killer cabbie speeding away from Grand Central Station – at the height of the rush hour. Jeremy Iacone’s script is riddled with plot holes you could drive a train through. And it’s filled with risible dialogue, as when Rhyme instructs Donaghy about a freshly killed victim, “You’ve got to saw her hands off at the wrist line! I’ve got to have those [hand]cuffs for [finger]prints!”
Truth is, the Rhyme-and-Donaghy story (her father, an NYPD officer, committed suicide; Rhyme wants to kill himself before his seizures turn him into a vegetable) is basically tangential to this watchable, yet fairly hokey, mystery. Washington does what he can with his paper-thin character, who’s such a genius he can recognize a logo from a 100-year-old book – and send his unlikely partner off to an antiquarian bookstore when the solution (no kidding) hits her over the head.
Jolie, who perpetuates one of the phoniest-looking crying scenes ever, is thoroughly unconvincing as a cop. She’s consistently upstaged by Queen Latifah, whose sassy presence turns what might have been a thankless role as Rhyme’s nurse into a minor triumph. Everyone else – including Michael Rooker as a bad cop and Mike McGlone and Ed O’Neill as good cops – are reduced to an exposition-spouting stereotype.
“The Bone Collector” boasts a truly ridiculous, out-of-left-field ending. Suffice to say it’s a lot closer to an episode of “Ironside” than to “Rear Window,” much less “The Silence of the Lambs.”
