David and Creeper work for a drug cartel that controls criminal activity in Los Angeles. The leader of that cartel is called The Wizard. They both report to David's uncle. They're in charge of collecting the taxes that every criminal organization in the city must pay to the cartel. David is married, has children, is a very familiar man. His whole family's in the business. Creeper's single, just enjoying life, and apparently he's a ruthless killer. The daily conflicts of his criminal world will be altered when a criminal they call "Conejo" imposes his new rules, trying to be the new boss of bosses. Confrontation is inevitable

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It seems that the filmmaker David Ayer was delighted with the so-called "narco-films", he surely saw a marathon of this type of production and wrote the script quickly. Because from start to finish, he thought he was watching a narco-film, only with a little more money to make the action and violence scenes. David Ayer wrote the great Training Day and has directed other interesting films, where he has used a couple of rough men as protagonists, for example End of Wacht I liked it very much. But since he directed Suicide Squad he has lowered the bar a bit.

Narco-movies, series B are very popular, they are shot in a short time and are consumed by the Mexican working class, Latin Americans in the U.S. and in a lot of other Latin American countries. They have a proven success, many of them can be seen on youtube, accumulating millions of visits and tastes. They are low budget productions, with lots of violence, beautiful girls, guns and drug culture everywhere. The music genre called "corridos" is always present in these productions.

That was the only thing this film lacked to be a complete narco-film. There is no "corrido" in the whole film, the director preferred to put another genre also used in them, the reggaeton. In addition, the poster and promotional photos already showed where he had been inspired to make the film.

Stereotypes and clichés abound throughout the film, and I was bothered by the cheesy love scenes between the protagonist and his wife, full of commonplaces and the look of a Telemundo soap opera scene. The villain is very evil, and to prove it, he performs witchcraft and satanic rites, including human sacrifices. In that scene I couldn't help but laugh. All that evil is added to the story to counteract the good of the protagonist, who is a criminal, murderer, drug dealer, but eats tacos as a family, loves his wife and children and believes in God very much, praying to him every day before eating.

Again the stereotype of the Latino in the United States is shown as a colorful person who spends all day eating burritos. Well, the narco-movies that David Ayer was inspired by also use that stereotype.

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Shia LaBeouf is the best-known face in the whole cast. She plays Creeper, David's partner, the main character. Both are in charge of collecting taxes for all the bands operating in Los Angeles. All criminal organizations must pay their taxes to the cartel, so Creeper and David will instill fear in everyone. This is the thing that bothered me the most in the whole movie. These two don't instill any fear, and LaBeouf is used only as a hook to attract non-Latino audiences.

Don't expect to see LaBeouf getting all motherfucking killed on anyone who gets in his way. The trailer and the promotional photos are a hoax. The character of Creeper is painted at first as the incarnation of the devil himself. Brief flashbacks and an overacted LaBeouf suggest that he's a killing machine. Oh, my God! What a huge disappointment I had with this character.

The film's main character is David, played by Mexican-born actor Bobby Soto. Reviewing his IMDB record, I learned that he had a role in the film A Better Life. I don't know much about his other work, but in The Tax Collector he makes the effort. This would be his most important film, but he doesn't have enough charisma on the screen, so I couldn't feel any sympathy for his character.

As an antagonist, they looked for a popular rap artist in Los Angeles, named José Conejo Martí. The singer plays the real devil, a ruthless drug dealer known as "Conejo".

The female cast is made up of very beautiful actresses. Actress Cinthya Carmona plays Alexis, the wife of the main character. I didn't like her performance, but it's because of some bad dialogue. I think the filmmaker found a chapter in a soap opera and told her to recite the dialogues that way. The other actresses are little known names, but very sexy on the screen. The most striking is the Cheyenne actress Rae Hernandez, who plays "La Gata", the villain's companion and an expert killer, a killing machine always in heels and sexy clothes.

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I am a lover of violent and bloody scenes and this film has several scenes that I liked. In low-budget movies, those scenes are done in a horrible way. But The Tax Collector had a bigger budget, so the bloody scenes are very well done. This, plus the sexy girl who's a professional killer, are the things I liked about the movie. It's what kept me going until the end of this crazy thing that David Ayer did.

The film has received bad reviews on all the movie portals where people come in and give a score. It premiered at some drive-in theaters, where it grossed just over $300,000, and on VOD streaming platforms, where box office receipts exceeded $2 million, according to this article in the Los Angeles Times (Link) It looks like it was one of the biggest box office hits of the past weekend, but is still far from the $30 million it cost.

Trailer

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