Screenwriter Todd M. Friedman has ambitions with the story of Collection, which is fashioned as a character study but clearly wishes to operate like a thriller. The opening scene is made of intentional misdirection, in a curious decision that reflects poorly on the trajectory of the story for no particular reason. One player in it is clearly the target of some cunning plan on someone else’s part, and through trickery, director Marianna Palka has made us believe that Brandon (Alex Pettyfer), the lost soul at the center of this tale, is that other person. To be fair, when the initial stages of the story are in motion, we can’t blame ourselves for jumping to that conclusion, even after we learn a little about Brandon. Everything within us seems to be sounding an alarm: This is not a good man.
Nothing is quite so simple, of course, but after all, Brandon is the co-executive at a debt collection agency with his longtime friend Ross (Mike Vogel). They use any means of cunning and exploitation and strong-arming at their disposal to peel away money owed by those in dire straits or otherwise unable to pay up. As if that weren’t enough, Ross is also a racist, sexist, power-hungry douchebag of the highest order, and some of those qualities have rubbed off on his younger friend. One wonders if, perhaps, Ross strong-armed Brandon in a previous life to become his friend – or, that is, one would wonder such a thing, if one gave the tiniest lick about Ross in the first place. Since that is an impossible task, it is also difficult to find the headspace to wonder much of anything about him.
This is the uphill battle, for Friedman and for us: to find anything sympathetic about these characters, given their occupation and their attitudes toward clients. The movie tries in both cases – Brandon’s son died in a car accident while he was driving, while Ross suffers from a medical condition – but neither Pettyfer nor Vogel is up to the task of humanizing these men’s baser qualities. They are still determined to puff themselves up at the expense of their clients, whatever the “sob story” (aka genuine predicament) is provided to them over the phone, and we still feel the need to shower every time a telephone call ceases.
Two important things happen to set up the plot: Christina (Shakira Barrera), a young mother working at a strip club while her husband (Joseph Julian Soria) serves a stint in prison, meets and quickly falls for Brandon, while she unknowingly becomes the next target for the Brandon and Ross in their endless debt-collection charade. Meanwhile, the agency hires a new recruit in the form of Sean (Jacques Colimon), who has himself just been released from prison on drug charges and shunned by his family.
The rest of the story follows Brandon’s apparently burgeoning sense of decency as he carries on with Christina and Ross shows Sean the ropes. We’re not so convinced of that decency, at least from the evidence on display. Collection mercifully does not lead to the kind of climax we are expecting from a thriller or from that opening scene that hints at a chase. It still barters in a sense of the false starts and overcooked conflicts of a melodrama, though, and almost none of it is convincing.
Photo courtesy of Vertical Entertainment
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