Worst Assassin in history

Rating: 6/10 (15 January 2005)

If any of you have ever played the Hitmas video games you will probably think that you could do quite well as contract killer given the right tools. You'd probably be right, or at least you'd be a hundred times better than Vincent in this movie. Apparently the phrase "silent assassin" is not in his vocabulary. He doesn't even use silencers on his very loud gun.
Tom Cruise plays Vincent - a thoroughly conspicuous looking character who is in LA for a spot of contract killing. He hires unhappy cabbie Max (Jamie Foxx) for the whole night. Five stops, five kills - all in a night's work.
This arrangement might have worked if Vincent were competent in the least. But he's just terrible. He leaves evidence everywhere, makes moronic mistakes, walks in front of every CCTV camera in LA, leaves fingerprints everywhere, and blabs far too much to Max, who any half-competent assassin would off at the end of the night anyway. Whatever the bad guys are paying him, the paycheck far exceeds the skill. I know the face and name need to sell the movie, but surely you'd remember a suspicious guy who looked like Tom Cruise being at the scene of every murder in LA during the course of one night.
Michael Mann directs the film with amazing skill, brilliantly capturing the multiple looks and feelings of night-time LA. There are many scenes of tangible atmosphere in Collateral, so much so that the film is eerily calming. Using a combination of digital cameras for the car scenes and 35mm (Super35 sadly, not anamorphic) for the interiors there are many gorgeous shots and stunning compositions.
Cruise and Foxx have great chemistry together though it must be said that Foxx comes off as the better performer/character. Neither of them overact and keep their cool but there's a true realistic edge to his lonely cabbie than Cruise's idiot assassin who leaves incriminating exhibits A-Z all over LA.
Look out for a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo from the Transporter himself right at the very start.