Films involving Limb & Spinal Conditions

Limb & Spinal Conditions: Major Films

Title	Bone Collector, The (1999)
Alternative/Original Title
Disability	Limb Quadriplegia
Country	USA
Length	118
Genre	Crime
Rating	3
Director	Phillip Noyce
Cast	Denzel Washington Angelina Jolie Queen Latifah
Notes	Denzel Washington plays the police force's foremost forensic detective until an accident 4 years previously (part of a building collapses on him) results in his being a quadraplegic. Despite high tech care he's basically vegetating intellectually until the case of a serial killer is brought to him. Jolie plays a rookie cop who gets his approval and acts as his legs, supplied with two-way radio and at one point a camera on her head. The killer leaves clues (cf. Se7en) to tax his intelligence and keep the mystery on the boil. In an awesome piece of furniture removal the police department's technical resources are moved to his bedside. If you can accept this you might just swallow all the other implausibilities. Washington holds the film together but this is really a story too far. And of course in the way of these scripts the battle between hunter and killer gets personal. He even gets to fight the killer using his electronically controlled bed which the killer obligingly puts his head under. This is not Hitchcock's Rear Window or Silence of the Lambs and what lift it might give to someone who is really in Denzel's bed I don't know. But the really big question is why doesn't he get out of his bed? Why doesn't he get into a wheelchair and scoot off to the police station instead of bringing the mountain to Mohammed? Washington's character has the use of one finger. There are quadraplegics who don't even have that and manage to travel by car and train and plane.

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