Slick, empty -- much like the lead actor.

Rating: 3/10 (8 August 2004)

I knew *Collateral* wouldn't really be good, but I was a big fan of Michael Mann's *Heat*, one of the great crime films of the Nineties. I admit to a sort of fondness for Mann's portentous, slick style, even though such fondness is really against my better critical judgment. *Collateral* does have the typically operatic moments we associate with Mann's work: the slow sweep of the police copters over the throbbing neon of downtown L.A.; the sleazy decadence of your average industrial-beat-thumping nightclub; the macho professionalism of the cops and their drug-lord antagonists (even though the latter resort to telling threatening stories about Mexican Santa Clauses who leave little toy burros on the windowsills of naughty Mexican kids [don't ask -- it ain't worth it]). . . . Occasionally, the picture has that Mann shimmer to it, especially at the end, when a cobalt-blue dawn illuminates an industrial landscape of power-lines and train-tracks.
Unfortunately, the movie also has Tom Cruise, with a shimmer of his own: a bad dye-job on his hair. Short and spiky, it looks as if it was dipped in melted chrome and dusted over with blue kohl. They even colored his adolescent beard and bushy eyebrows the same color. What gives? Was this some attempt to give Cruise "gravitas"? Meanwhile, we're still looking at the 5' 4" frame and listening to the pre-adam's apple dipthongs. And he's wearing a silver-gray suit that MATCHES the hair. Oh Lord. (And the advertisement atop Jamie Foxx's cab touts "Bacardi Silver". Hey, all this color-symbolism stuff is downright Kubrickian! Right?) The point is, we NEVER buy for ONE SECOND that Tom Cruise is a ruthless contract killer . . . or some of us don't, at least. Otherwise respectable film critics are giving Cruise high marks for believability, but please recall that the newspapers for which they work ADVERTISE these films, and dissing Cruise or his movies would definitely characterize a critic as a "non-team player".
To make matters worse, the script provides Cruise with all kinds of Oscar-bait. In several windy monologues, the hit-man wheedles on about the existentialism of suburban L.A., the merits of Charlie Mingus, the death ratio per-hour from the Rwanda genocide -- you name it. As a member of the paying movie-going public, I don't need to hear my hit-men lecturing me about Rwanda, thanks. Meanwhile, Foxx's response to all this is a sort of what-the-hell're-you-Talking'-about scrunched-up expression, amplified with several "whatever, man"'s. My sentiments exactly.
Let it be said that Foxx out-acts the Big Shot all over the place. We forget that the cabdriver is Jamie Foxx, even as we're constantly reminded that the hit-man is Indisputably Tom Cruise. But the script lets Foxx down, as well, during the scene in which he's chattering his teeth at an evil drug-cartel overlord. One minute he's terrified . . . the next, he's threatening to go all postal on the gun-toting goon standing behind him. Didn't buy it, sorry. I also didn't buy the old low-battery-cell-phone shtik. Quick, call the Cliché Police before that battery runs out!
Best scene in the flick is the convergence of hit-man, cabdriver, police, and Asian drug lords at a thumping night-club. Real suspense here, along with realistic gun-play, even though it further cements the Cruise character as a sort of Terminator with a you-can't-touch-this force-field around him. (Maybe it's the silver glow.) The whole scene sort of reminded me of Chaplin's *Modern Times*, that part in which the Tramp's attempt to serve a customer roast duck across a crowded dance-floor becomes an Epic Quest.
But Mann has already lost us before that, when he resorts to pulling out the old coyotes-roaming-Pico-Boulevard card. Ah well -- brainless summer fun. Enjoy. 3- or 4-stars out of 10.