David Ayer’s The Tax Collector is worth a look for the ways it pulls together a small scale production with outsize ambitions. Bolstered by a diverse and interesting cast of a kind we don’t see nearly enough, it paints a vivid portrait of the seedier side of the Los Angeles underworld. Unfortunately, the scale of those ambitions is done a disservice by an undercooked story that goes through too-familiar paces to arrive at a too-familiar outcome, without enough variations in the formula to make it truly memorable in its own right.