Great

Rating: Null/10 (14 March 2008)

Collateral (2004)
**** (out of 4)
A cab driver named Max (Jamie Foxx) picks up a ride (Jada Pinkett Smith) and the two starts chatting on the way to her workplace. Along the way we get to learn a lot about Max but after the young woman gets out, a man named Vincent (Tom Cruise) enters the cab and the rest of the night is full of surprises. Vincent offers Max seven hundred dollars if he'll drive him around for the rest of the night and since this is double what Max usually brings home, he accepts the job. Vincent tells him he has five stops, which is true but what Max doesn't know is that Vincent is a professional killer who has five people to kill before six in the morning.
Michael Mann's Collateral certainly isn't anything original and I think you could say a lot of it's routine but the director certainly knows how to tell a story and mix in his whole style that the viewer can throw the unoriginality out the window, sit back and just enjoy the ride. There have been countless films dealing with hit men, their unexpected guests and the police chasing them so in that aspect, Collateral is by the books. However, just like the director's Heat, this film takes the ordinary setup in different directions and adds a layer that we're not use to seeing and in that way, the movie becomes something on its own.
You could select one-hundred directors working in Hollywood today and I'd guess at least ninety-eight of them would have turned this movie into a non-stop action film without for a second trying to tell a story. As in the director's previous film Heat, Mann really isn't too interested in all the killings but instead he tries to get into the mind of this cold blooded killer and the hostage he is taking along for the ride. The screenplay by Stuart Beattie is full of wonderful dialogue, which takes us from one killing to the next.
After each killing the two men come to terms with their current situation and their actions go from there.
Two scenes that really jump out include one where Cruise forces Foxx to go to the hospital and visit his sick mother. How many other action dramas would have taken a time out to do such a thing? Not many but by allowing this scene to take place we get to know more about Cruise and Foxx's characters, which is very important in upcoming scenes. Another scene is in a jazz club where fan Cruise gets to chat with a guy who worked with Miles Davis.
Again, the action and suspense built by the director takes a backseat so we can learn more about the two characters and again, this here eventually pays off in later scenes. I won't ruin this second scene for you but it's a rather heartbreaking one that has so much stuff going in it that like the Foxx character, Cruise becomes another object after this.
The screenplay is a big key here as is the direction but the real benefit is the two leading actors who turn in some of the best work of their careers. Cruise in my opinion is this generations Paul Newman, an actor who can constantly stay popular and draw in the crowds but at the same time he's not afraid to take on darker subjects. The big buzz surrounding this film is that Cruise would be playing a killer and he pulls that off quite well and for the first time in his career, he actually plays a fairly frightening son of a bitch. Most actors would have constantly been screaming in order to build suspense but Cruise takes the right note by playing everything calm and collective. By playing the role this way the viewer knows very well that this guy means business and knows exactly what he's doing. With this in mind, we don't see the lovable Cruise playing a bad guy but instead we see a rather scary killer doing his job.
The real key is Jamie Foxx however, who manages to match Cruise step for step and it will be a shame if the Academy didn't recognize his performance. There's no doubt people will be drawn to this film for Cruise and the story itself could have let the viewer draw sides with Cruise but Foxx is so good in getting every point across that he's able to take the film over and have the viewer rooting for him instead of American's most loved actor. Had Foxx not delivered a top-notch performance than the film would have lost all meaning and the dialogue and story probably would have been thrown in the back seat to Cruise playing the bad guy.
The one major flaw with the film occurs at the end when the dialogue is thrown away and we're left with a big chase scene through the subway, which is something done way too many times and nothing new is brought to the story here. The film could have ended in so many different ways that it's a shame we had to go out like this but even with that said, Cruise, Foxx and Mann has created a very special film that should have a long life just like various thrillers from the past. Collateral is the perfect example of a routine story being brought to life by actors doing their job and a director taking the story in different directions.