Stupid beyond belief

Rating: Null/10 (8 December 2004)

Michael Mann, the director of Collateral is proud of how long it took to get the right paint for the cab in which much of the film's action takes place. That's fine, of course. Attention to detail is vital. It's just a shame that the same attention could not have been paid to the script, which is so full of ludicrous events and banal star turns that it would take a lot more pizazz than this film possesses to distract you from them. The first frisson of worry about Collateral should be provided by the presence of Tom Cruise in the starring role. I have a lot of time for Mister Cruise and believe he is actually quite a talented actor. Unfortunately his appearances on screen rarely back me up, and I am left weakly repeating, "What about Magnolia? And Vanilla Sky?" to anyone who will listen. (I think I am the only person in the world who found that latter film anything more than an unendurable embarrassment) In Collateral Tom Cruise plays Tom Cruise: all smiles and charisma and screen presence without anything even approaching a believable or remotely realistic character. Jamie Foxx plays a cab driver who gets embroiled in Tom's evil task. Tom's evil task is to kill all the people involved in a high-profile court case due to take place the very next morning. Now, let's just pause here for a moment. If the witnesses in this case were so important as to be deemed worthy of being killed by a hired (at quite high cost, I would have thought) assassin, then surely they would also be deemed worthy of protection (on the night before the trial opens) by the police. But no. Instead of having all these bozos under surveillance or in a safe house or whatever, the cops have just left them to their own devices, so that Tom can kill 'em all. Which is convenient, to say the least. The hired assassin, instead of having his own car (will the bad guys' budget not stretch to it?) takes a cab to the first hit, and then expects the cabby to drive him round LA all night for the rest of the hits on his hit list. Hey, it's a great concept for a dumb movie, but as soon as you actually think about it for more than one second, it's nonsense. Why doesn't Cruise rent a car or get his criminal mastermind bosses to rent him one? Why doesn't he just steal one? For that matter, if you can afford one brilliant assassin to kill the targets one by one, thus eventually attracting the attention of the cops, why not pay several bad guys to kill one each, all at once? Job done. Let's get outta here.
But no. Instead we have to endure a desperately contrived buddy movie designed, as far as I can tell, to do two things: prove that Tom Cruise can play a bad guy, and showcase Jamie Foxx's acting talents. The movie fails dismally at the first task and just about succeeds at the second. Jamie Foxx is indeed very talented, and should go far. He transcends a lousy, cliché-and-coincidence-ridden script with real skill, but even he can do little when reduced to standing on a rooftop and shouting up at a hotel window. Likewise, watching a cellphone's battery go flat is not my idea of high drama, but Foxx puts as much as he can into it, under the circumstances.
Collateral wants so much to impress you with its overhead shots of LA and its orange night-time glow. Once you get past all that though, what else is there? That stuff should be the icing on the cake, not the cake itself. You can't make a movie out of expensive details and lashings of style. If the plot, characters and dialogue are not up to snuff then no amount of gee-whiz cinematography can bail them out. People who go to the cinema are not that stupid. Surely Michael Mann knows this? Perhaps not. Perhaps he feels we should be grateful it took such a lot of time and money to get the cab to look just right. Perhaps he feels this will stop us howling in disbelief when that cab overturns at high speed and both occupants (neither of whom are wearing seat belts) walk away with barely a scratch.
Perhaps he thinks that Tom's Windows XP tablet will be distraction enough from the fact that all he actually needs is a few photographs and a piece of paper with some names, addresses and times written on it. He could put all this in his pocket and then Jamie Foxx wouldn't be able to wreck the plan by throwing the tablet off a bridge. Ah, but then you wouldn't get that show-off sequence where Jamie gets to pretend to be the assassin and proves to himself and to the audience that his destiny is to be more than just a cab driver for the rest of his life. In fact, if you excised all the ridiculous, coincidental and downright stupid events from this movie you wouldn't have a movie at all.
Michael Mann is a fitting heir to the throne vacated by Stanley Kubrick. Like Kubrick's, his films are technically brilliant and full of blustering male performers. But it's all just for show: there is nothing beneath the gleaming surfaces and the Oscar-worthy acting. Collateral is never boring, which these days counts as high praise indeed, but it is never convincing, either. Its plot is a ludicrous joke. Its script is nonsense with pretensions to profundity: "I shot him. The bullets and the fall killed him." Yes, Tom, whatever you say.