Behind the gripping crime thriller, another Collateral waits, off-melody and behind the notes.

Rating: Null/10 (23 May 2010)

When I first saw Collateral back when it came out I just thought it looked a bit iffy and without much effort behind it, like me or you could've shot it except it has Tom Cruise in it and people shoot guns. Six years later and it looks sublime, magic, meaningful; that's it, it looks meaningful. There's a lot of things cribbed from genre here, the alienated lone wolf without a past and a list of people to kill, the average schmuck with a dead-end life all big dreams and none realized, much like you and me, caught up in extraordinary circumstances, cops hot on the tail of the wrong guy.
This all melody and words, all neat and orderly arranged in harmonies easy for the ear to identify, it's the tune that randomly comes up in the radio while you drive around and you find yourself humming along with it. It's all vaguely familiar like something you've heard elsewhere, in other cars from other radios, the name of the tune doesn't matter, it's simply something to hum along to. On one level Collateral, Collateral the taut gripping crime thriller, strums in its guitar basic questions made of plot and hung on empathy, "will the cabbie make it out alive?", "will the cops get the right guy?", "will he save the girl?", questions posed then accepted or declined. Then as you drive around humming the familiar melody, you catch something from the corner of your eye, out the open car window you see dogs crossing the road with eyes gleaming in the night, through an open window you're allowed a glimpse into a cramped two-room apartment and a couple of Chicanos are lounging with a laundry line between them, weird mural paintings next to gas stations, whole streets ablaze with the neon lights of shop signs.
And then at some point this cacophony of bustling city life begins to make sense, now we're beginning to pick up something behind the melody and words and the tune having served its purpose begins to fade in the background. Now a different freejazz Collateral reveals itself off-melody and behind the words, the moody noir with the dreamlike latenight atmosphere, where the backgrounds are deep and the nightskies have a curious bronze hue to them. Now we begin to hear Los Angeles play itself so that it's not only a matter of two thugs getting gunned down in a deserted backalley, it's the deserted backalley that matters because Mann supplies the movie with the surroundings proper in which the characters can love and die and face lifechanging dilemmas and be divert. I love this Collateral that suggests an entire world full of possibilities because it poses questions and leaves them open; and what if I took a right here? what if I got off the car and wandered down that alley? All this reminds me of the Dadaists and their reveries: or as Baudelaire would have it, "to walk the city in order to experience it".
Near the end Mann shifts back to pounding techno rhythms as Collateral threatens to become an action movie, with chaotic shootouts inside dance clubs and the villain indestructible bursting through panels of glass and jumping on moving trains, but this too is all part of the ceremony, part of the pasteboard formula and shibboleth meaningless created by the situation whose need it answers. At sunup the movie turns sober and lyrical, with some of that little death of profound exhaustion the crack of dawn always brings after an all-nighter, which is only fitting and proper for the occasion because someone is boarding the express train out of the world.