Here’s every David Ayer movie ranked from worst to best, including the Suicide Squad director’s most recent release, The Tax Collector. David Ayer made an auspicious start in Hollywood. Having never attended film school and not having grown up in the industry, Ayer wrote his first screenplay based on his experience as a submarine sonar technician in the United States Navy. U-571 garnered him enough attention to get more high-profile gigs, including a co-writing credit on The Fast and the Furious. After his screenplays for Training Day and S.W.A.T. gained him top reviews, he made the jump to directing in 2005 and has worked consistently since then.
Ayer’s work is typically categorized by its focus on the city of Los Angeles, where Ayer moved to as a teenager and which he credits as a key inspiration for his work. He is especially interested in stories of law and disorder, from the officers of the Los Angeles Police Department to the tank crews of World War 2. These are stories of “men on a mission” akin to one of his greatest influences, The Dirty Dozen (a film he is attached to a remake of).
Expect scenes of strong violence and emotional bleakness. For many critics, Ayer’s work is overladen with nihilism and a lack of true purpose, while others have been won over by his rough-around-the-edges approach to familiar tales and his refusal to sugar-coat anything. With his eighth film as director now available on VOD, The Tax Collector, here’s how his filmography stacks up.
8. Bright
It’s not that the concept for Bright was an unsalvageable one. Fantasy fiction is built on allegory and the use of the speculative to explore real-life socio-political concerns. It’s not uncommon to see fictional creatures and animals used as stand-ins for issues of racial and ethnic justice. Bright, however, made every conceivable mistake in bringing its tale to life. Based on a script by the now-infamous Max Landis, who said the film was going to be his Lord of the Rings, Bright tries to blend together a grimy buddy cop dramedy with the warring inner-city factions of Los Angeles, only this time there are orcs, elves, and occasionally dragons.
The sight of orcs dressed in gang colors and using AAVE, therefore coding them explicitly as Black and Latinx, is an awkward viewing experience, to put it mildly. The movie has no grasp of the layers or implications of its poorly thought-out allegorical approach, and it doesn’t help that the narrative is so messy. Hearing Will Smith say “fairy lives don’t matter today” may be the real low-point of the beloved actor’s career. The one shining light is Joel Edgerton, who manages to bring pathos to the screen even as he is swamped under layers of orc prosthetics.
7. Suicide Squad
The chaos of 2016’s Suicide Squad is now the stuff of Hollywood cautionary tales. It’s a narrative that’s been so thoroughly picked over, parodied, and pitied that by this point in time it’s hard not to feel at least a little bit sort for Ayer himself. The movie’s failings are plentiful and obvious: The incoherent tone; the jumbled plot that veers between ridiculous and incomprehensible; the grimdark aesthetic clashes with the rushed neon overlay added in reshoots; the reshoots of Suicide Squad are evident from first glance and seem to have been shoehorned awkwardly into the narrative; everything Jared Leto does as the Joker raises eyebrows and guffaws of laughter.
Of course, whatever you think of Ayer’s work, it’s worth remembering that he never got to fully complete his vision for Suicide Squad, between the brief six-week period he was given to write the script to the multiple edits demanded by the studio. Still, it’s his name on the movie and questions remain over whether Ayer’s brand of solemn sleaze was ever right for such a story. Calls for an Ayer cut of the movie continue.
6. The Tax Collector
After the big-budget and much-hyped efforts of Suicide Squad and Bright, Ayer decided to take things back to basics with The Tax Collector, a film that has more in common with his earlier efforts than the franchise fare. Shia LaBeouf reunites with Ayer for another gritty Los Angeles-based drama about a pair of “tax collectors” who work for a local crime lord collecting his money from across the city. As is befitting a David Ayer movie, it’s gruesome and violent and heavily skewed towards a more nihilistic tone. It’s also painfully trite and derivative of dozens of other movies that have trodden this familiar territory. This vein of mean-spiritedness could work given the bleakness of the plot but it all plays out so dully. It doesn’t help that the film is defined by its seriously questionable portrayal of Latinx people, dialogue, and culture, something Ayer has been called out for many times before. The most interesting aspect of the film – the massive chest tattoo LeBeouf got for the movie – is barely on-screen too.
5. Sabotage
Released the same year as Fury, Sabotage takes its influence from a rather unexpected source: The Agatha Christie novel And Then There Were None. In one of his strongest roles following his post-Governorship return to acting, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the leader of a DEA special task force set to take on a deadly drug cartel in one of their safe houses. The job seems to be going well until, one by one, the team members are picked off in bloody fashion, and everyone is a suspect. The mystery aspects of the film work more than the typical bloody action stuff but the former is much less present than it deserves to be. Instead, it’s another bleak bloodbath oddly devoid of purpose.
4. Street Kings
Street Kings started out life as a screenplay draft written by the legendary crime author James Ellroy, with directors as acclaimed as Spike Lee and Oliver Stone reportedly attached to direct (the latter denied this) before Ayer took over. It’s easy to see why Street Kings would have attracted the attention of Ayer so early on in his career but less so for Lee, given that the end result is a rather forgettable action thriller that’s somewhat buoyed by a strong cast that includes Keanu Reeves, Hugh Laurie, Naomie Harris, and Common. While it is interesting to see a film about the Los Angeles Police Department that refuses to deify or whitewash the oft-ignored corruption of the American justice system, the story doesn’t take things far enough.
3. Harsh Times
Ayer’s directorial debut Harsh Times followed the familiar territory of his screenplays, with another Los Angeles-set tale of a traumatized veteran who wants to do the right thing but finds himself in a downward spiral of violence and corruption. Ayer had the great fortune to land the impeccable Christian Bale for his leading man and the actor predictably throws himself into the part of a man so fractured by his trauma that he cannot escape his fatal circumstances. Freddy Rodriguez and Eva Longoria are also excellent and help lift the material to its emotional peaks when the narrative gets a bit too silly. Its climax, however, lands with real force.
2. Fury
Ayer has always had a love for films about morally grey men on a mission, the darker the better. With Fury, he came the closest to capturing that vibe with his ultraviolent homage to The Dirty Dozen. Brad Pitt may be the name above the title and Shia LeBeouf was the one who got all the press attention for his Method tactics, but Fury belongs to Logan Lerman, who is beyond striking as the inexperience newcomer to the tank who slowly loses his innocence and potentially his mind. It’s a story of nihilism and the twisted kind of brotherhood that forms in the face of ceaseless violence, and Ayer certainly did not skimp on the blood with Fury. Just in terms of literal filth, Fury may be one of the more striking war films that fully conveys the stain, literal and metal, of such conflict.
1. End of Watch
It may have been his third movie as a director, but 2012’s End of Watch arrived with the kind of force and fury that signaled the arrival of a film-maker to watch. Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña are a formidable duo as two close friends and LAPD partners whose day-to-day police work and off-duty lives bleed together in oft-dangerous ways. Even though the movie ticks off more than enough cop movie clichés, there’s a real freshness to End of Watch, an abrasive realism that taps into something more honest than just another buddy cop drama. Peña and Gyllenhaal’s chemistry is the stuff that most film-makers can only dream of, bringing warmth and familiarity not only to their violent confrontations but their quieter, playful moments as friends. It’s a real peak for Gyllenhaal, an actor who constantly sets himself new standards as an actor, and the movie that Ayer will be living up to for the rest of his career.
