An unleashed David Ayer returns to his Los Angeles stomping grounds in The Tax Collector, a grizzly and intense crime thriller where a bloody holy war is played out in the mean streets church of L.A.
Los Angeles is Spanish for “The Angels”. If the numerous L.A. crime movies – including To Live and Die in L.A. and Training Day – are any indication, angles are most definitely in short supply. L.A. is depicted instead as a world of violence and corruption, where agents on both sides of the law hustle to take command of the streets.
It is also a world where filmmaker David Ayer has based most of his cinematic works. Although born in Illinois and raised in Minnesota, Ayers spent his teen years in Los Angeles, a period in his life that clearly influenced his films. The Tax Collector is a return to those streets, and he has returned in a hail of gunfire and righteous indignation.
The Tax Collector stars Bobby Soto as David, a collector for a powerful and mysterious drug baron known as “The Wizard”. Along with his best friend and enforcer, Creeper (Shia LaBeouf), David visits various Latino gangs and collects 30% of their earnings. If they refuse, Creeper is let off his leash and does his bloody work. Things get messy when a new player named Conejo (Jose Conejo Martin) comes to town, looking to usurp the natural order of things through very violent means.
What follows is a war comprising not only of gang banger factions, but their quasi-theological positions as well. Religion plays a part in many gangster movies, with Catholicism especially prevalent in films dealing with Italian and Mexican characters. Yet its an eroded form of the religion, stripped of its ethics and twisted in its superstition, a crutch used by gangsters to justify their morbid moral stance.
In the case of David, he views himself as an “instrument of God”, a religious man of “love, honour, loyalty, family”, yet whose church is found not upon the rock that Jesus proclaimed, but in the unforgiving streets where upon every corner an enemy lies waiting. When another gang banger describes him as a “candle in the darkness”, there is comparison to be made to Harvey Keitel’s character in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, another religion heavy gangster. Much like Scorsese, Ayers has a strong Christian upbringing, although what denomination is unknown.
On the other side of the religion spectrum is Conejo, who is described as “demonic”, and with good reason. Ritual human sacrifice and murder most vicious is a part of his macabre method. One death scene in particular is extremely graphic in its nature, the kind of thing saved for horror films, which in a way The Tax Collector could be described as. In the middle is LaBeouf’s Creeper, who approaches the world with an atheist viewpoint, all about the here and now. As he describes to David when he comes face to face with his would-be-victims: “I’m their God.”
Ayers is not shy in his depictions of violence via gang culture, the sunburst skies of Los Angeles splattered crimson with copious amount of bloodshed. His characters are mean in spirit and action, where even the heroes are driven by a corrupt ideology. The Los Angeles that he presents is not that of “the angels” any longer, but a living hell. The Tax Collector is a frightening, mean-mugging, and depth-filled a gangster exploitation movie as they come. It is Ayers at his brutal best.
