Star Power

Rating: 4/10 (22 August 2004)

This year's submission in the Tom Cruise Oscar grab is a stylized noir thriller from director Michael Mann, whose previous entries in the genre ('Heat', 'Thief') were bloated and derivative. Things aren't much better now: Mann's still derivative, though this time less of the subtle noir of the Forties than of modern gangster epics such as Brian DePalma's 'Scarface' with their razzle-dazzle nightclub shootouts. He might think he's making a small, intimate picture built on performances, but by encouraging underacting, he's actually oversizing the effect, with Cruise's megawatt star power unable to keep a lid on things; the movie gets louder and less interesting as it progresses. Cruise plays a hired assassin who employs a reticent cabbie (Jamie Foxx) to squire him to five various hits around Los Angeles. In writer Stuart Beattie's hands, there isn't much tension--you can see the structure of his screenplay from the first scene and the action set pieces seem baked in solely for Beattie and Mann to advance the dull interplay between Foxx and Cruise which spirals into conversations that inevitably boil down to the dreaded 'existential' despair that made 'Thief' and 'Heat' so unbearable. The film's meant to showcase the city's dark side but doesn't (Ken Russell's 'Whore' and Quentin Tarentino's 'Pulp Fiction' do a better job of that) because of Mann's fussy concentration on fitting Cruise into his visual scheme: he sports a short salt-and-pepper haircut and wears a gray suit, in line with Mann's sleek, blue-steeled, fluorescent building interiors (though certain scenes incorporate the neon that was emblematic of Mann's TV series 'Miami Vice'). Cruise is competent as usual, doing everything he can to keep his Vincent enigmatic, yet he only sporadically compels the audience's curiosity about his backstory. Foxx, as the driver, is better, though he's saddled with Beattie's caricature: his docile dreamer Max gets to be an outraged black man when he's able to seize the opportunity, which has the unfortunate effect of making what was supposed to be a brooding noir seem more like a self-actualization course.