Smart People Doing Really Dumb Things

Rating: Null/10 (31 August 2004)

Potential Spoiler:
This is a well-acted, nicely stylized movie that goes to some length to develop characters who are intelligent, but then has them doing absurdly dumb things. Most action flicks require the viewer to buy into an inherently implausible premise, and this one is no different: Contract killer Vincent (Tom Cruise) offers hip, thougtful, smart, part-time cabbie Max (Jamie Foxx) $700 to unwittingly drive him to 5 different locations in Los Angeles so that he can kill witnesses in a pending drug case. Renting a car seems like it would have been a lot more convenient and a lot more discrete, not to mention cheaper, but OK. Similarly, such movies usually demand the viewer to accept the fact that otherwise smart people do a couple of slightly stupid things. But in this movie almost everything its characters do is incredibly stupid.
Things immediately become complicated when Vincent's first victim falls through a window and onto Max's cab, parked in an alley while Vincent makes his visit. Now Max knows what's going on. Does it make sense that Vincent, a cold-blooded sociopath, has Max continue to drive him around to finish his business, having to worry about whether, how, and when Max is going to escape or alert the authorities, in a cab that has a smashed roof and a broken windshield with traces of blood on it, rather than kill Max on the spot and hail another cab? Why is the first victim's body put in the trunk of the cab when for the rest of the movie Vincent has no qualms about leaving bodies strewn all over Los Angeles? Are we suppose to believe that when two policemen stop Max's cab (for a broken windshield) and want to have it impounded, they blithly accept Max's explanation that the blood on the windshield came from hitting a deer (what about the smashed roof?)? Are we really suppose to believe that Vincent puts his plans on hold for a hospital visit to see Max's not particularly sick mother, rather than have Max call her ("sorry Mom, can't visit tonight")? Are we really suppose to believe that Vincent would have Max impersonate him (Vincent) in a solo meeting with a scary drug lord and his bodyguards, confident that Max won't rat him out, or fail to persuade the bad guys that he's Vincent, either of which would have disastrous consequences for Vincent?
The movie is full of equally dumb or inexplicable events, so much so that I found the movie tedious, not at all suspenseful or entertaining.