first rate thriller...up to a point

Rating: 7/10 (3 September 2005)

What happens when a working class stiff - you know, a decent human being and a live-and-let-live Average Joe type - finds himself face to face with Evil incarnate? Well, that's exactly what happens to a cab driver named Max in Michael Mann's allegorical thriller "Collateral," a sharply-defined morality tale that unfolds on the freeways and surface streets of after-hours Los Angeles.
"Collateral" is that rare crime drama that is more concerned with theme and character than with the mechanics of the crime - at least until the movie shatters to pieces in its closing reel, that is. But for starters, writer Stuart Beattie has come up with a humdinger of a premise to get the ball rolling. Max has been driving a cab for twelve years now, but he still has dreams of owning a fancy limo company one day, then retiring to his own private little island getaway in the South Seas. One fateful night, he picks up a fare who will end up changing his life forever. Vincent is a paid assassin who virtually kidnaps Max, forcing him to drive him around town so he can track down and execute his assigned hits. Max can do little but look on helplessly as he gets pulled further and further into this cat-and-mouse game of cold-blooded murder.
"Collateral" is, above all, an actor's film, as two intriguing characters square off in a fascinating duel of wills. As Max, Jamie Foxx beautifully captures the subtle intensity of a man, passive and humanistic by nature, who is forced to participate in what is to him an incomprehensible case of ritualized slaughter. Tom Cruise, cast against type as an unshaven, salt-and-pepper-haired villain, is chilling as a steely-eyed killer seemingly cut off from even the most basic human emotions of empathy and concern for one's fellow man. Together, these two fine actors draw us into their epic struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil, with the latter seemingly holding most of the cards.
The movie is filled with moments of extraordinary suspense and tension as Vincent and Max act out their human drama against the backdrop of a beautifully filmed LA at night - with Mann showing, once again, as he did in "Heat," that no director captures that milieu with greater precision than he does. Moreover, the moody soundtrack provides a perfect, otherworldly complement to the slightly surreal story unraveling on screen.
Unfortunately, "Collateral" falls apart long about the last half hour, as the plot mechanics take over and the characters become pawns in the hands of an out-of-control screenwriter who obviously could find no workable way to bring his tale to a satisfying conclusion. The tension in the first three-quarters of the film derives from our knowledge that Vincent has, for all intents and purposes, caught Max in a snare from which he cannot escape. Thus, that cab becomes a crucial factor in the human drama taking place within its restrictive confines. But once Max and Vincent leave the cab and become separated in the closing stretches, we lose that sense of claustrophobic entrapment so essential to the tale, and most of the tension evaporates. Thus, what starts off as a severely circumscribed tale of two men caught in their own private little hell ultimately devolves into a damsel-in-distress, knight-in-shining-armor action fantasy that undercuts the realism and seriousness of all that came before.
Still, taken as a whole, "Collateral" is a thriller well worth watching.