"Take Comfort In Knowing You Never Had a Choice"

Rating: 9/10 (5 August 2015)

You're driving a car. There's a man sitting behind you. He intends to kill 5 people and wants you to drive him to them. What do you do? This concept is the focus of Collateral, putting a normal man in to an impossible situation and following his desperation as he tries to do whatever he can to make it through the night.
Whilst this is the film's story, it begins as a movie with a far different tone. To begin with we follow cab driver Max (Jamie Foxx) as he carries out his normal night of fares. He picks up a woman named Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith) and they flirt and talk as he drives her on the journey. He talks of his dreams of making his own Limo company and she talks of her stressed life as a Lawyer. It ends with her thanking him and passing a number. This scene is great partly because it works so well on its own, almost like a separate short film. It's a romance that does not feel phoned in at all, but instead develops some genuine chemistry between the pair.
More importantly, it's an essential scene in showing us the kind of man Max is in his normal life. He's just a regular guy, who may dream of his limo business but has never had the nerve to act. It's important we see this so we can understand the normal person he is before his life is very suddenly thrown into disarray. This happens when a man named Vincent (Tom Cruise) pays Max $600 to drive him for the night and get him to the airport as he hates life in the city and wants to leave as soon as possible. However Max discovers that his passenger is a hit- man and is taken hostage to drive Vincent to 5 targets he needs to kills that night. After this we watch as Max reluctantly drives him wherever he's told, trying to get away from at every possible turn and reduce the death toll in Vincent's path.
By all rights the plot is something that you would expect from a typical action movie. But the film is able to elevate it far above the standard action movie formula through the very realistic approach it uses to tackle the story. This is done by constantly grounding the story through Max. He's nothing like your usual John McClane action hero who spouts out one liners and makes light of the situation, but instead a very uncertain and terrorised victim. His attempts to get away from Vincent are often badly thought out and he reacts to murder just as any ordinary person would. Foxx's down to earth performance is definitely the anchor of the film as it ensures that the focus is not on the action, but rather a tense conversation between a sociopathic killer and a man in fear of his life and the lives of those around him.
When it comes to who you might picture in the role of a murderer, it's unlikely that Cruise would be the first person to come to mind. However Cruise also does a great job at playing outside his usual roles. Instead of being the cocky likable hero, he's a very detached man who's able to blend into crowds and drift in and out without turning a single head. He's utterly ruthless with no regard for human life and will do anything he needs to get the job done. He doesn't even feel guilt for any of his actions and looks down on others like Max who do feeling it as redundant to feel empathy for people he never even knew. He even disdains the typical life of people in a city like Los Angeles, where people seem to just drift through their lives and never take any real risk in their lives.
This story could have all too easily been a run of the mill action movie. But fortunately through both Mann's great direction, a screenplay that knows to put the focus on character over action and great casting, it becomes a truly great thriller.