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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

The Collector

THE COLLECTOR (Marcus Dunstan). 88 minutes. Opens Friday (October 30). For venues, times and trailers, see Movies. Rating: NNN


For its first two-thirds, The Collector is an energetic Saw knockoff with a nifty set-up that could have powered a more original movie.[rssbreak]

Arkin (Josh Stewart) is a safecracker with a midnight deadline and a strong reason to pull one particular country-house job. Unfortunately, he’s chosen the same night that a masked maniac has turned the house into a booby-trapped labyrinth and taken the owners captive. From then on, it’s all about people tiptoeing around, getting captured and escaping, with occasional nasty death and torture porn.

It’s effective up to a point. Director Marcus Dunstan, who co-wrote Saw IV to VII, has a good sense of pacing and knows where to put his gruesome close-ups. More importantly, since Arkin is almost the only developed character (there’s also a small girl), Stewart makes a believable and engaging protagonist, a rarity in current shockers.

But, like the deliberately drab visuals, the action is too repetitive to sustain the tension till the end. Once the little girl arrives, we know exactly where it’s going and wait impatiently for it to get there.

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