A “tax collector” working for a local crime lord finds his family’s safety compromised when the rival of his boss shows up in L.A. and upends the business.
David Ayer has directed a lot of interesting movies including “Street Kings,” “End of Watch,” “Fury,” “Suicide Squad,” and “Bright.” The one thing I’ve noticed is that even though some of these films are mediocre at best, he always manages to get good performances from his actors. However, while “The Tax Collector” presents a violent and gritty portrayal of the business side of L.A. gang life, for the most part, the performances fall flat. The only saving grace here is Shia LaBeouf, who elevates the movie above averageness with his intense and ruthless depiction of a gang enforcer. He has come a long way since “Even Stevens” and the Transformers films.
David (Bobby Soto) and Creeper (Shia LaBeouf) are best friends but they are also tax collectors for Wizard (Jimmy Smits), the biggest gangster in the Los Angeles area. David is the brains of the operation while Creeper is the muscle, saddled with a violent and brutal disposition, prone to vicious and destructive outbursts. They drive around the city every day, collecting money for Wizard from the other gangs and they get a cut of that money. When Conejo (Jose “Conejo” Martin), an old enemy of Wizard’s moves back into the area, he threatens David and Creeper and warns them that if they don’t come and work for him, he will kill them and their families. He gives them time to think about the offer and they make their way to David’s uncle, Louis (George Lopez), who informs them that Conejo and Wizard were rivals for many years but then Conejo went back to Mexico and has always had a reputation of being a street terrorist, with absolutely no compassion or consideration for others. He is also known to worship Satan and people claim that Conejo cannot be stopped because he has the power of the devil on his side.
When Louis and his associates tell David and Creeper not to worry as they are going to meet Conejo to straighten things out, the two men feel a sense of relief but later that day, when David receives a text from Conejo asking him to stop by, he reveals his uncle’s decapitated head in an icebox. David leaves infuriated, with Creeper on the verge of committing total annihilation against Conejo and his gang but being outnumbered, they retreat to their headquarters to meet up with the rest of the gang so they can establish a plan of action but before they can formulate a strategy, Conejo and his men show up and kill everyone except David, who manages to escape out the back. He picks up his wife Alexis (Cinthya Carmona) from work and his two kids from school and places them in a hotel for their safety. He then visits an old house where long ago he buried over a million dollars in the ground just in case of an emergency. When he returns to the hotel though, he finds Alexis dead and a message from Conejo stating that if he doesn’t meet him at his house within the next two hours, he will kill his children.
With nowhere to go and no one left alive to help him, he turns to an old ally, Bone (Cle Shaheed Sloan), the leader of the Bloods street gang, and asks for his help. Because the two men have always respected each other and helped each other out in the past, he agrees to accompany him to Conejo’s place, along with his men, so he can retrieve his children and kill Conejo, once and for all. With nothing left to lose, the men set off on a journey that may very well be their last!
Instead of following in the footsteps of other gang-related movies such as “Menace II Society,” “Boyz n the Hood,” and “Juice,” “The Tax Collector” gives an insightful look into how the men who work for the biggest gangster in Los Angeles, go about their daily business, collecting money from other gangs and dealing with important day-to-day issues but also the mundane ones too. Shia LaBeouf has never come across as threatening or intimidating throughout his career but here, director David Ayer paints him as a homicidal monster, along with a shaved head and prosthetic cauliflower ears, he will skin you alive, drill you to death, or simply empty his gun into you, if you so much as look at him wrong and very few actors can get away with that sort of intensity. LaBeouf carries the movie on his shoulders and it’s just a pity he exits the film around the halfway mark because while David, played by Bobby Soto, is the story’s central protagonist, he fails to capture your interest in him the way LaBeouf did and when he ends up alone, you find yourself yearning for Creeper, as barbaric and cold-blooded as he was, he breathed life into the movie and kept you intrigued.
“The Tax Collector” is an impressive and occasionally gripping look into the life of a modern-day gangster and the ramifications that come along with it and while the direction and cinematography, as well as Michael Yezerski’s compelling score, raise the film above uniformity, the performances, minus LeBeouf’s, flounder, and subvert what could have been a contemporary classic.
Available on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray SteelBook, and DVD October 6th
