A-list stars, Z-grade movie

Rating: 1/10 (6 August 2004)

America's film critics have finally succumbed to madness. Collateral enjoys a healthy 85% approval rating on the Rotten Tomatoes site, yet it is easily one of the ten worst films that I have ever seen. I'll grant you that the average moviegoer will probably not hate it as much as I do - nobody goes to a modern thriller expecting a masterpiece - but I think it's fair to say that many discriminating viewers will find this film trite, instantly forgettable and deeply disappointing. Worse yet: it's boring.
Beware, for some minor (and hopefully vague) spoilers follow. I need to give away some of the plot in order to convey just how inane this movie is. I'm sure you already know that Jamie Foxx plays a cab driver who picks up a hit-man played by Tom Cruise. Foxx is placed in the unenviable position of ferrying Cruise around the city, watching helplessly as his passenger bumps off key witnesses in a major trial.
Think about this plot for just a second, and a host of potential problems will rear their ugly heads. Surely, Cruise will have to kill Foxx at the end of the night - otherwise, Foxx will go to the cops and spill his guts. Yet Foxx doesn't seem to realize this. For the first half of the film, he goes along with everything Cruise says, putting up only a frustratingly wimpy front of resistance. His character is so clueless that he actually visits his mother with Cruise in tow, not realizing what everyone in the audience knows; Cruise only wants to meet mom so he can hold the threat of her death over Foxx's head.
Though Cruise runs rings around Foxx for quite a while, our hapless cab driver actually has about five or six great chances to escape, all of which are squandered. He fails to give Cruise the slip in a hospital, in a bar, and in a crowded nightclub. Cruise threatens to shoot innocent bystanders, but since he's already killing people, surely it behooves Foxx to make an escape attempt anyway? Of course, Foxx does panic and flee at one point - and, within seconds, runs from a crowded area into a completely deserted one. Like you would, under those circumstances.
Why is Foxx so scared of Cruise? Maybe because the hit-man is virtually indestructible. He shrugs off injures from car crashes and bullet wounds to the neck, soaking up damage like the Terminator and springing back to life every time he apparently dies. At one point, Cruise actually takes on a whole squad of cops and bodyguards in a packed dance cluband kills them all. Never mind that there are dozens of people around, and all anyone really has to do is grab him. I mean, come on - since when does one hit-man take on an entire crowd? Aren't assassins supposed to be subtle? Credibility is stretched so far that, even by Hollywood standards, the movie is goddamn absurd. Naturally, Cruise has to inexplicably wimp out in time for his final battle with Foxx, because we can't have the evil guy winning, can we?
If only the action was the only lame part. Alas, the screenwriters pour salt into the wound by veering into 'philosophical' territory. Cruise waxes on about his abusive father (is this supposed to make him sympathetic?) and gives Foxx a tedious series of 'seize the day' speeches about following your dream - recycled, no doubt, from the equally annoying scripts of Fight Club and Dead Poets Society. Hollywood writers would have you believe that, if you just apply yourself, you can go from convenience store clerk or penniless cabby to successful entrepreneur in a matter of weeks. All you need is an eloquent bad guy to give you a boot in the a**! Any moment now, I expect Doctor Doom to come crashing through the wall and give me an inspirational speech about cultivating my writing talents. Or not.
Shameful! It's just shameful. There's not a line or a scene in this movie that hasn't been lifted from another source and put through the trivializing machine. There's even a subway chase that feebly echoes The French Connection. The horror...the horror...
Time to shut up now. You know how it is with bad movies; there's so much to complain about that it's tempting to overindulge in the smorgasbord of sarcasm. Incidentally, the increasingly silly Roger Ebert gave this three and a half stars - the same rating he gave The Shawshank Redemption...