A Pretty Decent Action-Suspense Thriller

Rating: 7/10 (4 March 2009)

Highlighted by great performance from Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise, this is a movie that holds your attention and basically picks up steam as it goes along, leading to a pretty good last half hour as Cruise's Vincent stalks his last victim, and Foxx's Max stalks him in return. The plot was intriguing enough. Max is a cab driver who unwittingly picks up a hit man (Cruise) and is then forced to drive him from hit to hit all over Los Angeles, becoming more and more deeply involved against his will. I enjoyed seeing Cruise in this role. He was rather convincing as the cold as ice, professional hit man who cares not one iota about any of his victims (and he even got to do one of his famous "Tom Cruise running frantically" scenes!). I also enjoyed the fact that, while there's a lot of violence in this movie, there's also an interesting psychological study of both Max and Vincent: Max the frustrated cab driver who has big dreams, and Vincent as the philosophical and well-cultured sociopath. If there's a weakness to this movie, it revolves around the character of Annie, played by Jada Pinkett Smith. Annie was Max's last passenger before Vincent climbed in. She's also a prosecutor who just happens to be going after the man Vincent has been hired by, and turns out to be Vincent's last target. That was just way too much of a coincidence for this to be truly believable (and, for that matter, it was also very predictable) and while that last half hour involving the three main characters is very suspenseful, it also stretches credibility a bit, as Max gets such a clear view from the street (a fair distance away) of what's happening 14 and 16 floors above him. Annie was also not a particularly believable prosecutor. At the end of the movie (which was itself a bit anti-climactic) she simply leaves the train? She doesn't alert the train's driver about what's happened? She doesn't call the police? What kind of prosecutor is she? Stretches in credibility aside, though, this was a pretty decent couple of hours. 7/10