Imagine if you would, a cheesy brightly colored poster posing the question “Your Money or Your Life” while featuring Mr. Machete himself, Danny Trejo, wearing a business suit and fedora. How did this go so horribly wrong?
Let’s get false advertisement out of the way first. Chances are if you’re reading this, the poster for "The Bill Collector" that you’re looking at for the movie is very prominently featuring Danny Trejo as the star. The movie is about an hour and a half long and he’s in for roughly 10 minutes and that’s generously rounding up. Right from the get go I was lied to but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Trejo’s character is a side character and crime boss named Uncle Frankie, who is seeking to collect on debt owed to him by the actual protagonist, Lorenzo Adams. Lorenzo’s boss has stepped away from his bill collecting agency to take a vacation and has left Lorenzo in charge of things while he’s gone.
With his boss on vacation for 18 days and Frankie looking to collect his money in 18 days, leaving behind his nephew Omar to watch over him, Lorenzo fires the entire staff and replaces them with unpaid workers of a city mission desperate for work opportunities under the pretense of being a free two week training program for people down on their luck all the while scheming to gather all of the profits he intends to save on worker’s paychecks and use it to pay back Frankie.
If the above synopsis didn't make it blatantly obvious, Lorenzo is not very likable. This wouldn't be a problem in and of itself but everybody unfortunately seems to be aware of it except for the movie itself. Lorenzo even admits several times just how screwed up both he and what he’s doing is. Despite this, the movie seems desperate to paint him in as sympathetic a light as possible but it just doesn't work. Yet as detestable as both he and his exploitative situation are, they're the least of the movie’s problems.
"The Bill Collector" is so incompetently made that it’s not even funny. The lighting is bad and makes everything on camera look cheaply produced, the music sounds like embarrassing rejected elevator muzak and the camera work is just atrocious. Productions faults like this would be funny if the film were effect driven but in a drama, it's just awkwardly embarrassing.
Watching it gave me an odd sense of Déjà vu that guided my thoughts towards the similarly badly crafted drama that went on to become a cult classic, Tommy Wisseau’s “The Room.” Unfortunately, where “The Room” was a terrible movie reinforced by the hilariously bizarre performance of Tommy Wisseau, there is almost nothing in “The Bill Collector” worth recommending. There are a few preposterous moments in the first half involving Lorenzo’s attempts to escape Omar but they don’t do enough to make you forget just how overall mean-spirited the movie is.
“The Bill Collector” comes in low due to how ineptly made it is but once it attempts to turn itself into Christian propaganda about the impact of church redeeming a corporate scumbag it becomes rather infuriating.
½ Shatners out of 4
Bottom Line: While far from the worst I've seen, "The Bill Collector" will be memorable if only for how it personally irritated me with its incompetence.
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