Overrated thriller

Rating: 3/10 (23 December 2004)

Michael Mann's COLLATERAL is firmly anchored by Tom Cruise and Jaime Foxx and it's nicely photographed, but it's also contrived and predictable and moves at a snail's pace,
The climax, in which several characters happen to find themselves in the same place, a building, at a most convenient time, doesn't wash with me.
Mann serves up a couple of polished suspense sequences, but his much-talked-about shootout scene in a nightclub is a total fizzer. It's all set-up and no delivery and the scene itself has little connection with the central plot.
Watching this flick a little voice in my head kept saying "we've seen it all before". I have. I've seen dozens of films about criminals in Los Angeles.
Mann's HEAT is still his penultimate work and is a wonderful film because it bothers to look at why its characters do what they do.