A thriller from 1999, directed by Phillip Noyce and based on the novel of the same name by Jeffrey Deaver (the first book in his Lincoln Rhyme series).
The main characters are quadriplegic forensics expert Lincoln Rhyme (Denzel Washington) and NYPD patrol cop Amelia Donaghy (Angelina Jolie), who team up to solve a string of murder cases in which the killer always removes a shard of bone from the victims.
The first victims are a couple named Alan and Lindsay Rubin who are kidnapped by the killer after taking a taxi home. Alan's body is found in a Civil-War-Era gravel bed. A few pieces of evidence are recovered at the scene by the resourceful Donaghy, despite not having the training or equipment for proper forensic work; when they are presented to Rhyme for analysis, he's so impressed that he insists she work the case with him. But time is not on the detectives' side against such a twisted killer...
This film contains examples of:
- 10-Minute Retirement: After Rhyme becomes paralyzed, he later helps the NYPD solve the Bone Collector's crimes, though he's no longer a police officer.
- Adaptational Villainy: In the book, the Bone Collector's motive was that Rhyme's error in judgement led to a perp getting loose and shooting his family dead. The film omits this Freudian Excuse, and the killer's motive was instead revenge on Rhyme for having him convicted for planting false evidence.
- Adaptation Name Change: John Ulbrecht, Tammie Jean Colfax, Amelia Sachs, Ernie Banks, Peter Taylor Colin Stanton, and Lon Selitto in the book; Alan and Lindsay Rubin, Amelia Donaghy, Kenny Solomon, Richard Thompson Marcus Andrews, and Paulie Selitto in the film.
- Adaptation Distillation: With no Dellray, there's no terrorist plot at the UN involving one of the killer's victims.
- Alone with the Psycho:
- Any of those that end up getting in the wrong taxi.
- An especially creepy version - alone with the psycho while paralyzed below the neck. It's even creepier in the book, where the psycho was actually Rhyme's personal doctor.
- Asshole Victim: Captain Cheney spends the film being an Obstructive Bureaucrat and a Jerkass. He ends up being murdered by the Bone Collector.
- Bound and Gagged: What the killer does to his victims, using duct tape to silence them and restraining them with old-fashioned handcuffs.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- Rhyme's NYPD badge plaque.
- Amelia's .38 Smith & Wesson revolver.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Richard, the technician who works on Rhyme's life support machine. He turns out to be Marcus Andrews, the Bone Collector.
- Chekhov's Skill: Thelma's knack for solving jigsaw puzzles comes in handy when Rhyme needs to piece together the fragmented paper images found at each crime scene.
- Christmas Epilogue: Rhyme hosts a Christmas party in his new wheelchair, where he is reunited with his family.
- Composite Character: Jim Polling and Fred Dellray are combined into Howard Cheney.
- Cop Killer: The killer shoots a taxi cop through the chest when pulled over and murders NYPD Captain Cheney at the end.
- Creative Closing Credits: An opening example. They display a series of vintage photographs, headlines, and newsprint from old New York, usually relating to unsolved mysteries, crime sprees, and Serial Killer activity. This is important.
- Creepy Souvenir: The serial killer is noted for collecting bones from his victims.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: One of the first victims is basically steamed to death. Other victims meet similarly cruel fates, including being eaten by a swarm of rats.
- Da Chief: Donaghy has her boss, Captain Cheney, who is of the strict and by-the-book variety. Although he is absolutely right that she is in over her head and is being asked to do things that are dangerous, of questionable legality, or simply out of her jurisdiction, his overzealous attempts to interfere and even take her off the case only hinder the efforts to stop the killer. Of course, he pays for this with his life in the end.
- Death by Adaptation: Thelma (Queen Latifah); also, several of the victims survive in the book but die in the film.
- Despair Event Horizon: Rhyme has nearly crossed over his due to his paralysis; Donaghy gets him to care about living again, and to reach out to his sister at the end of the movie. Helps when you have to fight for your life against a Serial Killer.
- Dirty Cop: The killer was a forensics cop who'd planted evidence in murder cases, whom Rhyme helped expose.
- Disability as an Excuse for Jerkassery: Donaghy calls Rhyme out for this, which gets him to reconsider his approach to walking her through crime scenes.
- Disappeared Dad: Amelia's father killed himself, and she ended up finding his body.
- Driven to Suicide:
- Amelia's father killed himself. Lincoln thinks she fears doing the same thing as well.
- Lincoln is also planning to die with help from a doctor friend, since he's afraid he might end up a vegetable. However, by the end it's obvious he won't, since he's come to enjoy life again.
- One of the people whom the killer framed had hung himself in prison.
- Dropped a Bridge on Him: Captain Cheney is Killed Offscreen by the Bone Collector in the third act after being a very prominent supporting character. After his dead body is revealed in a Jump Scare right before the climax, the film forgets about him.
- Enhance Button: Which Rhyme uses on his computer to clearly see what logo is on the pieces of paper that were left at each crime scene. Notably, he'd only zoomed in on images before, even blurrier ones, without implying he even had such a magical button.
- "Eureka!" Moment: A number of them, as is to be expected, but the identification of the image on the little pieces of paper as the publisher's logo of a true crime book and especially Donaghy realizing the clue left at the very last crime scene is Rhyme's own badge number take the cake.
- Fair Cop: As Rhyme notes with a nonverbal smirk in the movie, Donaghy is quite hot. Justified, as she was a model before her cop father died.
- Film Noir: Two detectives investigate a serial killer in a perpetually rainy, shadowy New York City.
- Fingore:
- The killer does this to almost every victim by cutting or ripping off their index finger so he can file down the bone for one of his clues or leave a misdirecting fingerprint on another.
- When the killer invades Rhyme's apartment to finish him off, Rhyme crushes his would-be murderer's fingers to a bloody pulp by using the mouth-control of his automatic bed to trap the gloating villain's hand between the bars of its frame.
- Following in Relative's Footsteps: Amelia became a cop like her father after he killed himself.
- Frame-Up: The killer was a forensics cop who'd planted evidence and framed people for murders. One had hung himself in prison.
- Gender Flip: Rhyme's caregiver. The book has Thom Reston, a male nurse, while the film has Queen Latifah.
- Genius Cripple: Lincoln Rhyme, a genius quadraplegic.
- GPS Evidence: All the evidence points to the location of the next victim. They cross-reference the evidence and are able to pinpoint the exact location somewhere in New York City.
- Hope Spot: When the killer's taxi is pulled over, it seems like he will be caught. Wrong.
- Iconic Item: The key chain that hangs off the rearview mirror of the killer's cab. It's never used to reveal his identity, only to let the audience know when someone has just become an incipient victim.
- Improbable Infant Survival: The final victims are a young girl and her grandfather. While the heroes fail to save the grandfather, they barely manage to save the girl.
- Insufferable Genius: Lincoln Rhyme is brilliant and does seem to have a problem showing it off. He is rough and rude to just about everybody in the movie at some point.
- In the Blood: Rhyme mentions the idea that people's genetics determine who they are, and says that it's nonsense, using the fact his parents only had middle school education with neither ever reading a whole book while he's the brilliant author of many books as proof.
- It's Personal:
- The killer's reason for targeting Rhyme and performing the murders that attract his attention—he blames Rhyme for ruining his life since he was a forensics expert, and it was Rhyme testifying against his analysis in a case that ruined the killer's reputation. Also a case of Moral Myopia since the killer doesn't seem to realize or care that if Rhyme hadn't said anything and his mistaken analysis had been accepted as testimony, innocent person simply would have rotted in prison; it turns out that one hanged himself. He insists they were all guilty criminals.
- Hell, from his Motive Rant, it sounds like the killer made moral judgments against his arrested victims, clearly believing he was serving justice against 'scum' to the point of TAMPERING WITH AND FORGING EVIDENCE. In essence, he decided they were criminals and that they deserved to be sent to prison, and fixed things accordingly; to him, none of them were innocent. Rhyme was doubly correct in his testimony, as the killer was also a hypocrite in his motive, dismissing that all his victims suffered the exact same fate as him.
- Jack the Ripoff: The killer's MO is to replicate a 19th-Century "true crime" penny dreadful titled "The Bone Collector". While discovering the book leads to saving (one of) his final victims, Donaghy also figures out that the killer left some clues pointing out his true final target is Rhyme. The killer also gloats that the only reason he copied the crimes was to leave an easy trail of clues for Rhyme to follow and try to prevent his rampage, and still Rhyme couldn't solve them in time to save anybody ("you failed, you fuck!").
- Jerkass: Captain Cheney is the stereotypical Da Chief who loudly insists getting the help of Rhyme was useless apropos of nothing and tries his absolute damnedest to get him and Donaghy thrown off the case. It's extremely unsubtly implied that he is also a Glory Hound, and that he otherwise wouldn't care about the fatalities he keeps throwing in Rhyme and Donaghy's faces as evidence of their inefficiency.
- Just in Time: Amelia arrives right as the killer is about to murder Lincoln, shooting him dead.
- Life-or-Limb Decision: A variation — Rhyme tells Donaghy to cut a body's hand off rather than risk damaging the handcuffs that he wants to examine, which Donaghy finds to be past the limit of what she's capable of in forensics.
- Linked List Clue Methodology: The GPS Evidence listed above is this, since each 'package' Donaghy finds for them to analyze contains evidence which, if properly identified, will lead to the location of the next victim. Played With, however, in that each package also contains a small scrap of paper with part of a picture on it; if the pieces are put together in the correct arrangement, they can find the book of old true crime stories the killer was basing his murder spree on and thus take a shortcut in the list, potentially getting to a crime scene early enough to save the victim.
- MacGyvering: A minor one. Donaghy needs to take a picture of evidence before it is destroyed or damaged, but the picture won't give any sense of scale to the object. So she puts a dollar bill next to it, giving it the required sense of scale, and causing Rhyme to become interested in her crime-solving instincts.
- The Main Characters Do Everything: Justified and deconstructed - Donaghy is a patrol cop with no forensics training beyond reading Rhyme's textbook on the subject, and she's only involved in the investigation at his insistence (he feels she has good instincts) and against her and her SO's objections. When Rhyme pushes her over the limit by ordering her to cut the hands off of a corpse, she storms off the scene.
- Man Bites Man: Lincoln bites into the killer's neck near the end, ripping out enough flesh to make him bleed profusely.
- Meaningful Name: Thelma might be a reference to actress Thelma Ritter.
- Moral Myopia: The killer is revealed to have targeted Rhyme for getting him convicted, even bitterly asking him if he has any idea of the hell he suffered in prison. Rhyme calls him out on the six innocent people he got convicted to the same fate (one got it so bad that he hung himself), though the killer is dismissive of this, believing they deserved jail and he didn't. This extends to his victims, none of whom are shown as remotely deserving of the pain and death he inflicts upon then; the killer never so much as bats an eye over the fact that (by the time he confronts Rhyme) he's killed more than a dozen innocents (including the near-drowning of a little girl), viewing them only as evidence that Rhyme isn't a good enough detective since he wasn't able to stop their murders.
- Never My Fault: The killer, Marcus Andrews, is a former forensic scientist who delivers a Motive Rant about how Rhyme unjustly had him convicted. A particular sticking point in Andrews' self-pitying tirade is that he had to suffer in a Hellhole Prison for a crime he was innocent of. Lincoln points out that what actually happened was that Lincoln exposed that Andrews had forged evidence that framed six innocent people who served prison time because of it, one of whom committed suicide. Andrews' response:Andrews: MY WORK WAS IMPECCABLE!
- Not Staying for Breakfast: Amelia is shown in her introduction after having slept with a man (whom she's implied to have had an on-and-off thing with) and rejecting his overtures for a relationship while she's leaving.
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: Captain Cheney spends the film getting in the way of Rhyme and Donaghy, and trying to get them thrown off the case for violating procedure. He isn't exactly wrong, but goes about it in a very unprofessionally hostile way and is clearly motivated more by territoriality and ego than legitimate concerns.
- Omniscient Database: Lincoln was said to have made one of these, but it doesn't seem to appear or be used in the movie, except perhaps in the scenes where Donaghy is told to feed the information from the crime scene 'packages' into a computer. If anything, it's more mental than physical for him.
- Pariah Prisoner: Part of the killer's Motive Rant is that he was a former cop who was thrown in prison."Do you know what happens to a cop in prison? You are brutalized every single day over and over... you become a human toilet."
- Photographic Memory: Donaghy has this, making her invaluable to Rhyme at all the crime scenes. Becomes suspensefully relevant when she discovers numbers on a subway car at the last crime scene and has to think back through a Montage of every number she'd previously seen in the movie, culminating with Rhyme's badge number.
- Phone-In Detective: Justified with Rhyme, who is a quadriplegic. If he could be in the field again, he would.
- Plot Device: The book of true crimes which, if they find it, will let them get ahead of the killer and save his victims. Though, in an unusual example, they don't know that they're looking for it until they solve the crime scene puzzle.
- Race Against the Clock: To a point, Rhyme and Donaghy have to do this for all the killer's victims, trying to find them before he's committed his crimes, but this is especially intense during the searches for the first victim (after the one found dead by the railroad) who has to be freed before a timed steam release from an underground vent blasts her, and the last victims, who have to be found before they drown or die of exposure.
- Race Lift: Rhyme is Caucasian in the books.
- Red Herring:
- During the scene when Donaghy goes to a used bookstore to find a copy of the book the killer was using as the basis for his crime spree, there's a rather creepy clerk who watches her with unusual intensity, and the camera highlights that he has the same gray-blue eyes that the killer does. It's played up as if he might be the killer, but he's never seen again.
- When Donaghy realizes that Rhyme is the next victim, we see Captain Cheney arrive outside Rhyme's apartment building, looking pissed, after spending the whole movie trying to interfere in the investigation and being shown looking tense every time the evidence of the crimes is discussed. It turns out the actual killer, Richard, actually offed him first when we see him dead outside Rhyme's apartment right after stabbing Thelma.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Donaghy's reaction when Rhyme tells her to cut the hand off the body of a woman she saw die not ten minutes prior.
- Servile Snarker: Rhyme's caregiver in both book and film versions. In fairness, s/he's just giving as good as s/he gets from Rhyme.
- Signature Style: The killer, aside from basing all his crimes on a turn-of-the-century Serial Killer, has a love of old things which shows up throughout the story—vintage weapons, old locations, old items (like handcuffs)...
- Swarm of Rats: One of the victims ends up covered in rats after being devoured by them, which the killer Invoked by opening several deep wounds on his body to attract them with his blood.
- Title Drop: The book of true crimes on which the killer is basing his murders is The Bone Collector, by no means a coincidence.
- Trailers Always Spoil: Some of the commercials included a voiceover rant from what was obviously the movie's villain. Leland Orser might not be a household name, but he's fairly recognizable and has quite a distinctive voice, so if you saw that commercial, you know he's the bad guy as soon as he shows up. The trailer also showcases the third-act Hope Spot in which the Bone Collector blows away a cop that stopped his illegal taxi, but removes the context and thus it looks like a random part of the villain's killing spree.
- Villain Ball: Pretty much how the killer meets his end. Instead of straight-out killing Rhyme, which shouldn't be too hard given the latter's paralyzed from the neck down, the guy goes into full-on bragging mode. This first leads to him getting his hand mangled when Rhyme is able to make the bed lower itself. Then Rhyme gets pulled down to the floor by the killer and given his agony at this point, you think he'd kill him, right? Nope. He continues rambling threats until Rhyme manages to lure him closer by mumbling and taking a bite out of his neck. When the killer finally decides to just do what he should have done at the start (just stab Rhyme), he's quickly gunned down by Amelia Just in Time.
- Voice with an Internet Connection: Rhyme's interaction with Donaghy in the field.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Due to his somewhat overbearing personality, Rhyme is subject to this several times by Amelia. Interestingly culminates in a dual case when she calls him out on reading into her files and her father's own file, to which he calls her out, significantly more gently than most examples, on holding herself back out of fear due to what happened to her father.Amelia: (Outraged at Rhyme reading her father's file) Man, you just keep charging at walls, don't you!?Rhyme: Stubbornness is a quality we both share...
- Would Hurt a Child: The Bone Collector is more than happy to drown a little girl by tying her and her grandfather to a pier, just to twist the knife if/when the police are unable to save her in time. It's unclear if the book he's basing his kills on involved a child in the fourth murder and therefore "required" him to replicate it, but he still shows zero qualms about doing so.