No Damage Done At All

Rating: Null/10 (8 August 2004)

"Collateral" is something you would expect from director Michael Mann: riveting crime-drama with a fine cast and good production values. Jack-of-all-trades Tom Cruise tries his hand once again (in a long time) as the villain and the results are deeply satisfying as we find him nailing people mercilessly and reasoning his actions with simple life experiences and relative perspectives of the world. Is he trying to fool us with this logic? Or is he attempting to fool himself? Or both? Yet, it is somehow a guilty pleasure that we root both for the good guys and him, and the credit for creating such a likable villain belongs to both Cruise and Mann. Rounding out the rest of the cast is an uneasy Jada Pinkett Smith, a truth-determined Mark Ruffalo, and last but not least, Jamie Foxx, who proved he could very well hold his own against the hard-edged Cruise in one of his best performances.
The two lead actors carry most of the movie's drive on their shoulders, making for one of the year's best on-screen duos. Good decisions were made on production sets as the producers shot all the photography on location in the dark streets of Los Angeles. Of course, Mann operated the camera himself to capture the realistic look of the city and its crime, and add his trademark colored-lighting and underlining orchestral / electronic music to intensify close-encounter moments. However, what seems most impressive is Mann's ability to turn Stuart Beattie's funny yet few-flawed script into such a heart-pounding, race-against-the-clock suspense film that resembles much that of his success in the mysterious "The Insider" and the decade-old favorite, "Heat". It is gratifying to know a director hasn't lost his touch over the passing years.