The Bone Collector
A thriller from 1999 (and first book in the Lincoln Rhyme series), the main characters are forensics expert Lincoln Rhyme (Denzel Washington) and a 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 hone. 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.
Tropes used in The Bone Collector include:
- Alone with the Psycho: An especially creepy version - alone with the psycho while paralysed below the neck.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Richard, the technician who works on Rhyme's life support machine.
- Creepy Souvenir: The serial killer is noted for collecting bones from his victims.
- Disability as an Excuse For Jerkassery: Donaghy calls Rhyme out for this.
- Enhance Button
- Fair Cop: As Denzel notes with a nonverbal smirk in the movie, Jolie is quite hot. Justified, as she was a model before her cop father died.
- Floating Head Syndrome
- Fulton Street Folly
- Genius Cripple: Lincoln Rhyme, a genius paraplegic.
- GPS Evidence: All the evidence points the location of the next victim. They cross-reference the evidence and are able to pin point the exact location some where in NYC.
- Infant Immortality: The final victims are a young girl and her grandfather. While the heroes fail to save the grandfather, they 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.
- Jack the Ripoff
- Life or Limb Decision: A variation -- Rhyme tells Donaghy to cut a body's hand off rather than risk damaging the handcuffs which he wants to examine.
- Magical Database: Lincoln was said to have made one of these but it doesn't seem to appear or used in the movie.
- 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 dissect a body, she storms off the scene.
- Man Bites Man: How the killer meets his end.
- New York City Cops
- New York Subway
- Phone-in Detective
- Race Lift
- 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 previously.
- Swarm of Rats: One of the victims ends up covered in rats.
- Ten-Minute Retirement
- Voice with an Internet Connection: Rhyme's interaction with Donaghy in the field.