Disappointing, Tom Cruise is still Tom Cruise

Rating: 6/10 (5 September 2004)

Collateral has none of the suspense or thrills of 'The Insider' or 'Heat'. Mark Ruffallo is wasted, Tom Cruise looks like George Michael circa Faith. The taxi driver, Max, appears to have had Danny Glover (in Lethal Weapon) providing 'how to be cool around psycopaths' acting lessons.
The love story is token, bowing to commercial pressures which you
would expect from Collateral Damage, but not from Mann. Moreover, Bacardi, purveyors of the funky fresh rum, appear to have sponsored the film outright, and their logo is in the second shot (and subsequent).
Tom Cruise is not capable of carrying this off. He managed to play serious in Magnolia because (a) he was parodying himself, so excelled through irony, and (b) he wasn't the lead. Here he is still looking like he did in Top Gun, but with snow spray on his hair, and a Wham 4'oclock shadow.
He is not helped by the dialogue either. Mann, like Tarentino, seems to have lost the knack for convincing small-talk among villains. In 'Heat' he humanises unusually brutal characters. In Collatoral, as critics have pointed out, there is an unusual amount of talk between the two leads. I'll steal from Pulp Fiction here; Just because Vincent is a character, doesn't mean he has character.
Cruise is still wanting to be the charmer. So unlike Brad Pitt, who knows
how to unsettle us enough to ignore his beauty for a moment, Tom hangs onto his likability like a dog to a slab of meat.
The 'sieze the day' and 'look at yourself man etc etc.' would be excusable if Vincent (Cruise) was exposed for the psychopath he is, a la Patrick Swayze in Donnie Darko, but instead Max the Tax sucks it all in and accepts his life is a failure. Odd, given he is the honest, hard- working stooge and Vincent is the ruthless psychopath. There is too much macho posturing, from the muscled cops and from Vincent's various penile extensions (PC tablets, cool Nokia phones and of course huge, huge guns), for his character to be truthfully presented. Instead we get an undercurrent of respect and sympathy for Vincent's effortless machismo and nihilism.
This is dishonest, as Vincent's character is never developed enough to provide genuine reasons for our sympathy. So we are left with fetishistic appreciation of Cruise's martial arts skills, which he has picked up over the years in a series of awful action bonanzas, which I hope he returns to after this.