‘Debt Collectors’ Movie Review: 2 Debt 2 Collect
When a global pandemic delays all the big summer action movies, it is the perfect time for everyone to discover the awesome action movies people like Scott Adkins and director Jesse V. Johnson have been making this whole time. Debt Collectors is the big summer sequel by default, since we’ll have to wait for F9 and Black Widow.
You can definitely still follow if you never saw The Debt Collector. Debt Collectors is a standalone, but if you like the characters, there’s a whole other movie you can discover too, and then there are entire bodies of work from these unsung action stars.
Scott Adkins and Louis Mandylor ARE ‘Debt Collectors’
In The Debt Collector, Sue (Louis Mandylor) trained French (Adkins) to collect debts from petty thugs. They reunite when Sue has more jobs for French. If you did see the first film and you’re worried about continuity, they do explain how they each survived. This is the kind of franchise where the important thing is to get the gang back together for another adventure. They’ll say whatever works to get them there.
Sue has three vigs to collect, so that sets up at least three big action set pieces, but there are many more because French always finds other ways to get into trouble. For example, he gets in a bar fight with American drunks after schooling them on why the British really lost the American revolution. It’s fun and they find a unique variation on a common action scenario.
‘Debt Collectors’ distills action down to its simplest
The movies Adkins and Johnson make harken back to the good old days of ’80s action. Sure there were still James Bond movies, and Arnold movies and Die Hard, but not everything had to be explosions and special effects. An action hero could just face off against bad guys and that was enough. It still is.
Debt Collectors are not spies or cops. They’re just thugs going after gangsters and it leads to exciting violence. Action movies used to be all about this, the gritty scuffles and foot chases between characters who had opposing desires. It still works now although nobody had moves like Adkins in the ’80s so it still feels bigger.
If you like what you see in Debt Collectors, please also check out Close Range, Accident Man, Avengement, the Ninja and Undisputed movies for more acrobatic Adkins brutality.
They’re getting too old for this
French and Sue are one of the great action partnerships. We don’t have Riggs and Murtaugh anymore, so French and Sue are our entertaining duo at each other’s throats for getting each other into this mess.
For a sequel, their banter hits the ground running. They know each other now. They give each other guff, but that’s tough guy respect. They’ll never use the L word but they’ve earned each other’s respect.
Debt Collectors has enough fights and chases to thrill viewers in their own homes. It is the next level after The Debt Collector, but hopefully people will discover both. Debt Collectors is available May 29 on VOD, and other Adkins movies are available on VOD, streaming, DVD and Blu-ray.
