A Movie That's Basically Saw Without Any Intelligence!

The Collection:

Story:

A serial killer abducts the daughter of a very wealthy and powerful man, resulting in a group of mercenaries tracking the killer down in a desperate attempt to save the daughter.

Review:

To explain The Collection, I need to explain a film series that the filmmakers previously worked on called Saw.

For those of you that missed the well known Saw series back in its hey day of popularity, I'll explain the formula behind it:

People who commit terrible deeds are abducted and placed in random places full of traps. They are given puzzles and tests that they must pass in order to survive a gruesome demise.

Sounds clever right? Well, the first Saw film was pretty good. Unfortunately they decided to continue the series with different crew members helming each film. As such, the quality of each film caused the story to deteriorate with time. At first, the plot twists were clever and kept you guessing, but then the sequels became so twisted and distorted from the original that you could tell the directors of the sequels had no idea where to take the series. The traps became repetitive, the deaths even moreso, even the theme of the series became so blatantly tedious and overdone that by the end of it it was a tangled messed up heap of plot twists. Even M. Knight Shyamalan couldn't put that many plot twists in a movie series.

So in between films some of the filmmakers decide it would be an amazing idea to incorporate some of Saw into a slasher horror film. That film ended up being a movie called The Collector.

The movie was, as you can probably predict, a terrible mess. The traps were not clever, the editing was sloppy, the only character who had any background was the main character and all they had was that he's a thief that pays off debts by breaking into houses (and stealing); and don't even get me started on the villain. I mean, yeah he was sadistic and very messed up, but that describes all slasher film villains. He's not even as intriguing as the villain in Saw, and that villain was some old guy that got cancer.

Anyways, you get the gist of it, The Collector is basically Saw without intelligence and without scary moments.

Cue to several years after The Collector, and The Collection is released. Like the first movie, there isn't a lot to it. Unnamed villain kills people with traps that make mouse traps seem amazing in comparison.

There isn't a lot to like about The Collection. I mean, sure the good guy is actually somewhat compelling to watch and his ability to survive at any cost was very visibly established, but the villain doesn't change at all, and the rest of the cast comes off as generic characters lazily written into the story.

The story itself was somewhat clever, even if most of the actors didn't look like they had any clue as to what they were doing, or looked like they didn't care at all.

Unfortunately the plot bodes worse. It is repetitive and as such makes each event in the film easily predictable. Sure, some scenes are brutally intense, but does each type of sequence have to occur one after the other in the same order throughout the whole film?

The effects consisted almost entirely of generic blood and gore. That was it. Nothing special about it. Oh bloody death occurred and blood sprays or flows. Oh no generic violence! Save me.

The editing isn't nearly as bad as The Collector's was. At least each scene was somewhat necessary and they didn't remove any important story components, so that was an automatic plus.

But overall The Collection isn't a very entertaining, thrilling, or scary film. I can't recommend it to anyone. Don't waste your money.