'The Debt Collector' - Movie Review

I watched "Triple Threat" recently. I wasn't terribly impressed, but went on to "Avengement" (also starring Scott Adkins) anyway. And that one kind of blew me away. It's intense, well written, and well acted. So tonight I watched "The Debt Collector," starring (you guessed it) Scott Adkins.

Adkins plays French - who is British, and a martial arts instructor in Los Angeles. The first scene in the movie shows that he's a really, really good fighter, and that his club is direly short of money. One of his students reluctantly introduces him to the world of debt collection as a means to make ends meet. French is paired up with the far more experienced debt collector "Sue" (Louis Mandylor), and they spend a weekend working a debt sheet. The pay is good, but there's more violence than French expected. The morality of the whole process becomes even more problematic for French as their last assignment of the weekend is simply a beat-down, not a debt collection.

Director Jesse V. Johnson (Adkins' frequent collaborator) mixes in black and white footage of cows being herded throughout the movie. Since I was pretty sure this wasn't an arthouse production, I became concerned for our protagonist as it began to look like this wasn't going to end well for the cow(s).

I'm not a huge fan of Adkins' martial arts style, which strikes me more as high quality brawling than the balletic grace of Jackie Chan. But aside from the annoying and unnecessary cows, the movie is well constructed, well written, well paced, and even - at least by the two leads - well acted. So in the end we have a good action movie. "Avengement" is better, but this really is quite good.