Working with the veteran leg-breaker Sue (Louis Mandylor), French spends his first weekend running around LA after various parties.
As the pair learn to work together, they realise that they are pawns in a power play between their employer and other parties...
Despite dabbling in the genre with the Marine franchise, I am still finding my way into DTV action films. It is a little embarrassing, considering how much of this blog is taken up with action movies, that I still have not done a deep dive.
Like many genres in the age of streaming, the lo-fi urban action picture has migrated from the big screen to the DTV market, where stars like Scott Adkins have succeeded in keeping the genre alive, with a focus on real stunts and violence.
One of the leading lights of the genre, Adkins has been on my radar for years, but I did not find a way into his filmography until I spied The Debt Collector on Netflix.
A hard-nosed 'buddy' movie in the no-frills, brutal style of Walter Hill and Don Siegel, The Debt Collector is a tight little action movie that does not aim high, but achieves all it sets out to, with a no-nonsense style and a welcome sense of humour.
While it is not an action comedy, there is a vein of sardonic wit running through the movie that makes its cheese and tough-guy posturing more bearable, with the movie's various set pieces acting as literal punchlines.
I have not seen Adkins in many things - I think the only one of his star vehicles that I made it the whole way through was the first Ninja movie. It was fine, but I did not have any desire to check out more.
As French, Adkins gets to straddle the everyman and the superhuman - he has a skillset that makes him formidable, but he has no experience with the LA underworld, and has to rely on a series of painful encounters with Sue to figure out how to navigate it. Adkins was a bit too wooden in Ninja, but that was a decade ago, and in this movie, with his natural accent, he is far more relaxed, and shows far more range as the rookie collector.
As his mentor/partner/insult trading partner, Louis Mandylor (most famous for his role in My Big Fat Greek Wedding), does the emotional heavy lifting as a gangster struggling to pull himself together and find some measure of redemption. He also possesses a rugged, brute physicality which provides a neat compliment to Adkins' athleticism.
The story is pretty rote, but is peppered with a couple of weird characters and enjoyable set pieces. Jesse V. Johnson shoots the whole thing with a steady hand, and a some visual wit to season the brutal action. It is a good-looking movie, and has some decent location work.
On the basis of The Debt Collector, I am keen to check out some more of Scott Adkins' work. If you are in the mood for an efficient action flick, you could do worse than check it out.
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