The Tax Collector (2020)
Directed by David Ayer
No — The Tax Collector is not woke, scoring 13 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
David Ayer returns to the sun-bleached Los Angeles gangland he has never quite left, and The Tax Collector arrives with a straight face and a grim errand.
Consciousness Markers
The film centers an Indigenous Latino protagonist and a predominantly Latino cast in a mainstream crime drama, a genuine representational choice for a genre dominated by white leads, though it is cast naturally to the setting rather than as a statement.
Latino and Black gang structures (the Mexican Mafia, the Bloods) are depicted as milieu, but the film makes no argument about racial justice or consciousness.
This is a hyper-masculine gangland revenge thriller in which the central female characters are a wife who is killed offscreen and a sadistic enforcer girlfriend; no feminist framework is present.
The criminal economy of 'tax collecting' is presented as personal gang politics rather than a critique of capitalism or wealth extraction.
Ayer's film preaches nothing; it delivers grim genre violence with no moralizing or social messaging.
No LGBTQ+ characters or themes appear anywhere in the film.
No environmental or climate themes whatsoever.
No body positivity themes; the film's physicality is entirely about violence and combat.
No neurodivergent characters or themes.
No historical revisionism; the film is a contemporary, apolitical crime narrative.
Why it received this score
David Ayer returns to the sun-bleached Los Angeles gangland he has never quite left, and The Tax Collector arrives with a straight face and a grim errand. Bobby Soto plays David Cuevas, an Indigenous Latino family man who spends his days shaking down forty-three gangs on behalf of an imprisoned crime lord. The film is populated almost entirely by Latino and Black performers, which for a mainstream crime drama of this vintage is a genuine and unremarked representational choice. The setting supplies the faces; nobody stops to announce them. That is the correct way to do it, and the film deserves a quiet nod for it.
The rest is blood and jiu-jitsu. Creeper, played by Shia LaBeouf with a chest full of tattoos and no discernible interior life, kills and dismembers with a shrug, and the film regards him with the flat affection of a man admiring a well-maintained truck. The women here exist to be loved, mourned, or sadistically deployed. Alexis is killed offscreen and becomes a motivational memory. Gata swings a hammer for the cartel. No feminist framework survives contact with this material, and neither does any argument about race, class, or the economy of extraction that gives the title its meaning. The tax collection is simply gang politics, personal and tribal.
Ayer preaches nothing. There is no climate parable, no body politics, no neurodivergent subplot, no revisionist history, no closing card instructing the audience on how to feel. The offer is a grimy, competently staged revenge picture that critics dismissed and audiences rented in droves anyway, briefly topping the charts in a summer when theaters had little else to offer. It is a film with a demographic conscience and no sermon. Whether that counts as progress is a question the film declines to ask, and we are left to file it accordingly.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
David Cuevas is an Indigenous Latino American family man who works as a gangland tax collector for high ranking Los Angeles gang members. He makes collections across the city with his partner Creeper making sure people pay up or will see retaliation. An old threat returns to Los Angeles that puts everything David loves in harm’s way.
Questions about The Tax Collector
Is The Tax Collector woke?
No — The Tax Collector is not woke, scoring 13 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Tax Collector have any woke elements?
1 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Representation Casting (62). On Representation Casting: The film centers an Indigenous Latino protagonist and a predominantly Latino cast in a mainstream crime drama, a genuine representational choice for a genre dominated by white leads, though it is cast naturally to the setting rather than as a statement.
How does The Tax Collector compare to other 2020 movies?
It ranks #117 of the 227 films from 2020 we've scored; their average is 21. The wokest is One Night in Miami... (83).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.