All the early attention for David Ayer’s crime drama The Tax Collector has focused on co-star Shia LaBeouf’s typically excessive devotion to his role; in this case, the actor got permanently tattooed so he could embody his character, a Los Angeles gangster known as Creeper. But LaBeouf isn’t even the main star of The Tax Collector, and his dedication to his craft is mostly in vain since Creeper spends nearly the entire movie dressed in buttoned-up suits, only potentially revealing his tattoos in one scene late in the movie in which they remain obscured.
LaBeouf’s absurd miscasting as a member of an inner-city Latino gang is the only interesting thing about the movie, though, which is otherwise a forgettable, low-rent thriller full of gangster clichés, with production values that seem far beneath a Hollywood filmmaker like Ayer. The subject matter, however, is the same ground Ayer has been treading since the beginning of his career: crime and corruption in Los Angeles, humorless macho posturing, loyalty at the expense of intelligence. Ayer is nothing if not consistent, exploring the same meager themes even when he takes on big-budget genre projects like Suicide Squad or Bright.
Here, the main character is gang lieutenant David (Bobby Soto), the “tax collector” of the title, who works for imprisoned kingpin Wizard (Jimmy Smits), collecting Wizard’s 30 percent take from the illegal activities of 43 different gangs in the greater Los Angeles area. Creeper is David’s best friend, right-hand man and enforcer, whose job is mainly to look menacing while David shakes down lower-level criminals for the money they owe Wizard. David is a devoted family man who lives in a nice house with his wife Alexis (Cinthya Carmona) and their children, and as the movie begins he’s getting ready for his oldest daughter’s quinceañera.
Seeing David as a family man is clearly meant to engender some sympathy for a guy who doesn’t hesitate to order Creeper to kill and/or torture anyone who doesn’t pay up, but he never comes off as a sympathetic character -- only a slightly less terrible person in a world full of terrible people. David loves his wife and kids, and he occasionally shows mercy in his gang work, stopping some rogue street criminals from killing a rival gang member over a personal (not business) dispute and letting a newly promoted middleman keep the cash he’s been skimming to pay for his kid’s cancer treatment. But Soto’s flat performance doesn’t bring any extra dimensions to David, and Ayer’s hackneyed writing doesn’t make the character anything more than a gangster cliché.
So it’s tough to care when David and Creeper find themselves caught in the crossfire between Wizard and his old rival Conejo (rapper Jose “Conejo” Martin, who apparently got to name his character after himself), who's recently returned to California after a decade in Mexico. With Wizard locked away in prison, Conejo tells David that he’s the new boss in town and David can either join up or be killed. There’s not much of a moral dilemma here since Wizard at least seems semi-reasonable and Conejo is a literal devil worshiper with a shrine to Satan, where he sacrifices a chicken and a naked woman in the movie’s most laughable B-movie sequence.
Martin’s performance is the worst in a movie full of bad or misguided performances, and his stilted line deliveries rob Conejo of whatever menace he might have. Comedian George Lopez tries for serious as David’s uncle, but can’t quite pull it off. And LaBeouf, even if he’s allegedly playing a white guy raised among Latinos, still occasionally puts on a half-hearted Mexican accent and is never convincing as a volatile killer. Soto fails to command the screen opposite any of his flashier co-stars, and he overcompensates for his generic character with melodramatic wailing when tragedy strikes.
Ayer takes all of this recycled pulp material so seriously that the movie becomes a chore to watch. Plus, the B-level action scenes are chaotic and not particularly exciting. The filmmaker’s take on street crime felt somewhat fresh when he wrote Training Day nearly 20 years ago, but his monotonous approach to the same material has grown stale, and The Tax Collector doesn’t have anything insightful to offer on its themes of divided loyalties or compromised morality. David isn’t fascinatingly flawed or complex; he’s just another criminal trying to justify his violent actions.
The movie isn’t complex, either, and without Ayer’s name on it, it would be indistinguishable from dozens of straight-to-video thrillers released every year. The filmmaker may inspire uncommon devotion from performers like LaBeouf (who previously removed a tooth for his role in Ayer’s war movie Fury), but there’s nothing in The Tax Collector to justify that level of admiration.
Starring Bobby Soto, Cinthya Carmona, Shia LaBeouf, Jose “Conejo” Martin, George Lopez, Lana Parrilla and Cheyenne Rae Hernandez, The Tax Collector opens Friday in select theaters and on VOD.