A genuine surprise: a subtle and impressive action film

Rating: Null/10 (26 August 2004)

Michael Mann's 'Collateral,' is a genuine surprise and one of the best movies I've seen in years. Offering a refreshing change from the standard fare, it might not be for everyone.
Under Michael Mann's direction, Tom Cruise and Jamie Fox break out of the standard action mold to create a deeply-engaging character study with the trappings of an action movie and its technique is reminiscent of fiction from a cleverer age. There is much to the movie that you could imagine having been written by a modern day Jack London. Cruise is a horribly competent paid killer, while Fox is a cabdriver, bound by his dreams of escape and by escape into his dreams-a man who has been driving a cab for twelve years and yet tells anyone who'll listen that it's 'only temporary.' Together, they work to show you what the best screen writing is: the actions of characters under the pressure of action and the effect of who they are on what they do. The contrasts and their effects are brilliant; they drive and inform the movie on a dozen levels, changing what might have been a roles that could have been handled by, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Will Smith into something that required more and that the actors delivered. Cruise's Vincent is an edge-player of the first water-tasked with killing five government witnesses in a federal drug case-and he is raw: a cynical and amoral animal intelligence driving all the muscle needed to back it up; an ex-special forces soldier 'in the private sector' who's only question is 'how?'. He bets his life on plans made in less time than it takes to read this sentence. Jamie Fox's Max is a style of everyman that everyone will recognize: Vincent's counterpart. He has intelligence but no drive. He has plans but he waits to execute them until the time is right and the circumstances 'perfect'-a man who is killing time and not realizing that time is returning the favor. For Vincent, Max is a resource, someone he can coerce and manipulate; the most effective way of getting from the scene of one crime to another, until the pressure pushes Max and twists him. When all is said and done, Collateral is a Mann movie, an unmistakably male movie; pure yang, shot through with stroboscopic flashes of intense and quirkily precise violence. The pistol becomes an icon in Cruise's hands, making you believe in his character and making you happy that you aren't in front of him. All in all, Mann's 'Collateral,' is something seen all too rarely in today's world of globalized profit-seeking: a thinking man's action movie with characters whose eyes have whole lives behind them whose words mean things and whose actions draw you in..