Cool Looking and Sounding Night Ride

Rating: Null/10 (10 August 2004)

"Collateral" is a cool looking and sounding night odyssey. Very similar in feel to director Michael Mann's "Heat," it is an extended chase scene between wary opponents, in this case two classes of adversaries.

One is the involuntary opponent, Jamie Foxx, doing mild-mannered surprisingly well, as the Hitchcockian ordinary-man-rising-to-extraordinary cab driver; he uses his comic talents quite believably in one scene where he has to mimic Tom Cruise's Special Forces-turned-hit-man mode of talking.

The other is law enforcement as they belatedly figure out what's going on, and provide the exposition explanations for the viewer. I wouldn't have recognized greased down Mark Ruffalo if I hadn't seen him doing a "Tonight Show" promo spoiler for the film.
Cruise is very effective here as a coiled, well organized villain, where, as in "Magnolia," he can't just use his now boring grin and movie star hero stance and Mann is not intimidated by him in shot placement (even though Cruise has something like five assistants and personal specialists listed in the credits).
The mise en scene rules, with sharp editing by Jim Miller and Paul Rubell, especially in a climactic night club scene where I lost track of the body count. A couple of more conventionally blazing action sequences follow (and I'm pretty sure the L.A. subway doesn't run so late at night).

There are many amusing references to other movies quietly dropped in with a straight face as being part of the characters' make-up, such as from "Taxi Driver," "Pulp Fiction," and "Speed," and pop culture in general, such as references to Cruise's height and an island photo on the visor from an old TV commercial.
The CD soundtrack only samples the complex musical selections (though it does include the Calexico song) and pounding mood-setting that could be by James Newton Howard but more likely by Howard Zachary Koretz or Antonio Pinto. There was one disconnect when the soundtrack is clearly playing neo-soul by someone like Ellis Hooks or Van Hunt or Ricky Fante that's not on the CD, yet Foxx's driver is talking about "the classics" coming out of his radio so I thought he meant Old School Soul but the conversation confusingly moved on to classical music.
This movie is definitely better seen and heard on a big screen than it will be on DVD or television.