Bullet Points: The Debt Collector (2018)
When I first heard that Scott Adkins was going to be in a movie titled The Debt Collector, I had a vision of a dark action comedy with Scott Adkins’ character working at a call center making collection calls all day. His boss is on his back about not meeting his collections quota. The majority of the calls he makes go straight to voice mail and when he does actually speak to a person they either lie to him, hang up on him or curse at him. Fed up with his lot in life, Scott’s character decides to go all debt collector vigilante and actually starts showing up at people’s houses looking to collect on their unpaid credit card bills.
As it turned out The Debt Collector was nothing like the vision I had conjured up, but if you want to know what The Debt Collector was really all about, scroll down and check out my review below…
- Hard Times: Scott plays a character named French. French owns and operates his own martial arts school in Southern California, but business is not good. As the movie begins the proprietor of a chain of rival martial arts schools in the area shows up at French’s school with two lackeys at his side looking to buy French out of his lease… French has no intentions of selling, but when his fellow martial arts instructor keeps pressing the issue, French challenges the guy to a fight… if French loses he will sign over the lease to him right then and there. If French wins, the guy and his minions will get the hell out of his school and they will stay out. French even acknowledges how this concept is straight out of a Kung Fu movie of yesteryear… and like the Kung Fu movies of the past, our hero triumphs as French takes out all three of the infiltrators in the first fight scene of many in the movie. But the victory is bittersweet… sure French won, but he is still in way over his head financially. With the dark cloud of losing his business and potential eviction from his home looming over him, he asks his friend Alex to do him a favor. Alex works as a collector for a prominent loan shark in the Los Angeles area named Tommy (Vladimir Kulich, The Equalizer) and French wants to see if Alex can get him a collections job with Tommy.
- A Boy Named Sue: Alex gets French a meeting/job interview with Tommy. During the course of their conversation, French is able to convince Tommy to bring him on as one of his collectors noting his past military experience in his native England and his martial arts skills. Tommy tells French to get himself a nice suit (Tommy likes the men representing him to present themselves in a professional manner) and that he is going to pair him with one of his most experienced collectors… Sue (Louis Mandylor, Battle Drone). French experiences a great deal of culture shock his first day on the job… first off Sue, the guy who has been tasked with showing French the collection ropes, is hung over and his attire is far from professional… in fact it looks like he has been wearing the same clothes for days. Then there are the actual collections themselves… French gets way more than he bargained for as he gets shot at and dragged by a moving car during their first stop. Stop number two doesn’t get any easier with French having to battle two huge guys who if you told me were the sons of Tiny Lister, I’d totally believe you. The third and final stop of the day ends with French walking in on Sue banging the wife of a guy who owed Tommy $40,000.
- The Swerve: After a successful first day, Tommy brings French and Sue along for a meeting Tommy has scheduled with a heavy hitter in town named Barbosa (Tony Todd, Candyman). Barbosa is looking to get a measure of revenge on a former employee named Conor Mulligan, who Barbosa claimed was skimming money off the top while running one of Barbosa’s clubs. Things seem a little off from the start, but the money that Barbosa is offering is too good to pass up, so Tommy agrees and he tasks his new collections dream team of Sue and French to track down Mulligan. But as our dynamic duo gets closer to finding Conor Mulligan, things really aren’t adding up. Everyone they encounter who knows Mulligan, can’t say enough good things about the guy… the complete opposite picture of what Barbosa painted for them. When our debt collectors finally get to Mulligan, they find themselves at a moral fork in the road… do they do the job they were hired to do? Or do they go after the real bad guy in this equation?
The Debt Collector owes a huge debt of gratitude to the Scott Adkins and Louis Mandylor dynamic. It was like Scott Adkins’ Tango found its Cash in the form of Louis Mandylor. The chemistry between the two stars is what really makes The Debt Collector work and the result is one of the more stand out movies in Adkins’ filmography.
Just like you can count on a Scott Adkins film being filled with Grade A fight scenes, you can count on one of my reviews ending with some Bonus Bullet Points…
- Familiar Faces: French’s friend Mad Alex is played by none other than action movie veteran Michael Paré of Streets of Fire fame… The bartender that French and Sue interrogate as they are trying to track down Conor Mulligan was played by Robert Rusler, who appeared in a bunch of guilty pleasure movies from the 1980’s including Weird Science, Vamp, Thrashin’ and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge.
- Memorable Insult: With Adkins getting to portray a character from England, he did not have to lose his English accent for the film as he did in some of his previous films like Ninja. This opened the door for both the Sue and Barbosa characters to refer to French as a limey at different points in the film. Barbosa took it a step further when he referred to French as “a limey with a frog name”.
- B Movie Superstar: There’s a fun bit in the film where Sue finds a poster of B movie that he starred in back in the day. I was hoping this was an actual movie that Louis Mandylor played an evil ninja in (he did appear in some martial arts themed movies like The Quest and Champions during the 90’s), but it appears it was just included in The Debt Collector to add a bit of comedy and another element to Sue’s backstory.
- The VUDU That YUDU: VUDU actually credited Jesse V. Johnson as the director of The Debt Collector and not the musician who was once a member of The Time. I’d like to think that it was my review of Accident Man earlier this year, where I pointed out the Jesse mix up, that got VUDU to make sure they got things right this time around.