Collateral -- Smart People Doing Really Dumb Things

Rating: Null/10 (31 August 2004)

I was very disappointed in Collateral, a film that was well acted, had good character development, and was well-crafted, but with a script that was too absurd to overlook. There's a fair effort made to develop the main characters as smart, if not cool and hip, but then they're asked to do the dumbest things. And not just one or two slightly dumb things, which might be forgivable, but really dumb things over and over again.
Let's start with the premise that out-of-town contract killer Vincent (Tom Cruise) is going to hire a confident, intelligent, savvy part-time cabbie, Max (Jamie Foxx), to unwittingly drive him to 5 different locations during the course of a night so that he can kill potential witnesses in a big-time pending drug case. A little implausible when renting a car would have been cheaper, more convenient, and less risky, but not too much more difficult to swallow than the premise of a lot of other action flicks.
Things suddenly get complicated when Vincent's first victim falls out of a window and onto the roof of Max's cab, parked in an alley to await Vincent's return from his visit. Now that Max knows what's going on, does it make sense for Vincent to have Max continue to drive him around for the other four killings, having to worry about whether, when, and how Max might escape, compromise his plans, or tip off authorities, in a cab that has a badly smashed roof and a broken windshield with traces of blood on it? Or does it make more sense for Vincent, an obvious cold-blooded sociopath, to kill Max on the spot and hail another cab? What's the point of putting the first victim's body in the trunk of the cab to drive it around for the rest of the night when Vincent later shows no qualms about leaving bodies strewn all over Los Angeles? Are we suppose to believe that when two policemen stop Max's cab to cite and impound it for being unsafe (smashed roof and windshield), they're going to blithly accept his explanation that the blood on the windshield came from hitting a deer? Are we suppose to believe that Vincent is going to be diverted from his evening's plans to accompany Max to visit his not particularly ill mother in a hospital (rather than calling her to say, "sorry Mom, can't visit tonight"), giving Max the opportunity to tell his mother or the hospital staff what's going on? Are we really suppose to believe that Vincent is going to have Max try to impersonate him in a solo meeting with a drug lord and his bodyguards when Max could just as easily rat Vincent out as be unconvincing to the bad guys, either of which would have disastrous consequences for Vincent?
I could go on and on and on and on, but the point is that I was so distracted by the constant, glaring logical inconsistencies in the movie, even after being willing to accept its inherently implausible premise, that I found it to be tedious, not suspenseful or even entertaining.