Great Movie, but needs better ending

Rating: 9/10 (28 September 2005)

I think Collateral is a fantastic movie. Jamie Foxx deserved the Oscar for this and Tom Cruise deserved a nomination for one of his best roles, and one of the few villains who he has played. Michael Manns beautiful style makes this a gorgeous picture to watch as we get a tour around street level LA, far from the Hollywood Hills and tourist attractions. Foxx's is likable and naive as the ordinary guy swept up into events beyond his control. Tom Cruise is fantastic as the slick likable Vincent (he played another likable Vincent twenty years ago in Color of Money) a perceptive hit-man. Cruise is like the Terminator in the actions scenes, an unstoppable killing machine who never loses his professional detachment. At one point, when Foxx questions him why he is killing people Vincent admits that he doesn't know, or care. He was just hired to do a job. Vincent is a terrific character, a great example of the banality of evil. What makes him so endearing and horrifying at the same time is that he is not some monster. He is witty and polite, and stops at one point to take in a jazz concert. At one point he tells Foxx a chilling story about his troubled childhood and how he murdered his abusive father. THen he laughs and admits he made it up. He had an ordinary childhood and his parents are still alive. He is not a hit-man because of some childhood trauma but just because life happened to open up that path for him. For most of this film Mann does a great job of frustrating our expectations about how a Hollywood film should go. The potential heroics are constantly foiled, Vincent almost never slips up. My only complaint is that the film abandons this paradigm at the end. Perhaps feeling the need to have a happy ending Mann allows Foxx in the last fifteen minutes to change from the everyman he has been throughout the film into an action hero. It would have been much more in keeping with the tone of the film to have Vincent simply finish his job, leaving our expectations of a heroic ending frustrated.