From the Archive – MOVIE REVIEW – Collateral

Originally published 8/17/04

Collateral
Director: Michael Mann
Writer: Stuart Beattie
Producers: Michael Mann, Julie Richardson
Stars: Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo, Bruce McGill

Nobody shoots Los Angeles like director Michael Mann (Thief, Heat). The skyscrapers look like Monument Valley in steel and glass. The freeways, shot from directly overhead, look like blood veins pulsing life around a mutated organism.

Vincent (Tom Cruise) doesn’t like it. He thinks it’s too spread out, too disconnected. Of course, what he disdains about it is also what makes it an ideal work environment for him. He can shoot two people dead in an alleyway and, with a quick look around, confirm that no one’s running to call the police.

He considers himself a professional doing a job; nothing more, nothing less. But he’s in denial of his true nature. He’s a virus, injected on this night into the body of Los Angeles to transform and/or destroy anyone he comes in contact with, until he triumphs or is eradicated.

Cruise has shown off action chops before, in the Mission: Impossible movies it has always been too preening; showboat-y acrobatics for showboat-y movies. Here he’s sleek, lethally efficient, rarely wasting movement or time in killing. Like Toshiro Mifune in the seminal deadly-samurai movie Yojimbo, Cruise has his game down enough that Mann can show him dispatching multiple targets in an unbroken shot, and we’re wowed by his simple craftsmanship.

But like another recent Los Angeles two-hander, Training Day, the story of Collateral does not belong to the scene-stealing villain, but to the innocent brought unwittingly into his element. Max (Jamie Foxx) is a good taxi driver – he keeps his cab clean, doesn’t waste time to jack up his fare, and can even tell you to the minute when you will reach your destination. He believes in doing a job well, but never imagined he’d be at this one long enough to be this good at it.

He’s pleasant, doesn’t challenge people, tells himself he’s simply biding his time until he can put away the money to start his limo service. He has the air of someone who will really listen to you, so people who need to talk have a way of opening up around him. Collateral often takes the form of a series of splendid character vignettes – the first a subtly romantic ride where Max soothes the nerves of a federal prosecutor (Jada Pinkett Smith) pulling an all-nighter to prepare for a big case. In a matter of minutes, the two realize they click on a deeper level than either could have predicted, and we get to watch it because Mann is so expertly patient.

But Vincent is Max’s next passenger, and he’s just as impressed with his driver’s punctuality, though for different reasons. He drops a wad of cash to hire Max out for the whole night; he offers casually that he has “five stops to make” before he needs to be back at the airport.

Once Max realizes what the game is, he has to progress from not wanting to help Vincent work, to feeling like he has no choice, to desperately seeking a means to change the situation. Meanwhile, an ambitious cop (Mark Ruffalo) is following the trail of bodies and suspecting there is an angle to what’s going on that the FBI and other cops are not considering.

To Vincent, Max has been sized up as no threat. And yet they’re bound together for this night, and so he lies, cajoles and threatens, even helps Max (encouraging him to stand up to his boss, buying flowers for his bed-ridden mother) if it will keep him together long enough to drive to the next stop. He doesn’t realize just how much by doing this, he’s toughening Max up enough to be a threat.

Vincent says, suggestively, that he has been at this for six years “in the private sector”. Max is terrified and confused that a creature like Vincent could exist. And yet, we get glimpses of a private side – Vincent tells a story about his childhood that he admits is at least part a lie, though maybe not that much. And, in another great moment devoted to character, he spares the life of one of his targets (Barry Shabaka Henley) for a few minutes so they can talk about Miles Davis. This movie lingers on faces in a way American movies don’t too often anymore, and it’s a breath of fresh air.

Max and Vincent’s conversations in the cab dominate the action, and there are times that Stuart Beattie’s script circles back on familiar streets. After awhile we know the score between these two, and don’t need to be reminded. But the two leads are good enough, connected enough in their unholy way, that it gets by.

Jamie Foxx has been building himself an enviable resume of “serious actor” roles in recent years, and it’s about time that people took notice. In every scene he is Cruise’s equal, brave enough to show the details of someone who’s quietly surrendered 12 years of his life to being the one who knows where to get off the 110 to avoid traffic. He doesn’t take on the trappings of the little guy and wink as if to say “don’t worry, Jamie’s still under here!” He simply is Max, the little guy.

Cruise has never been as transformative an actor but has instead worked from a base kit of movie star persona tics and built for the occasion. We still get the clenched laughs, the head tilts, the sarcastic eye-widening – but in a perverse way, Vincent channels his usual cocksure energy in a way we might never have imagined working so ideally.

There’s another aspect to the way Mann (along with cinematographers Paul Cameron and Dion Beebe) shoots this movie that distinguishes it. Most of the “film” is really high-definition digital video, unprecedented in a movie of this size that doesn’t have the words “Star” and “Wars” in the title. It’s unexpected for a thriller set at night, since the chief criticisms of digital video are its clumsiness with dark colors and a blurring effect that can happen with too much camera movement. Both are on display here, which will likely anger purists and eye candy junkies.

I prefer film over digital, but I have to admit, when you take this movie in the way Mann is showing it, there’s a hypnotic quality. The lights become haloed but the whole world seems dimmer and washed-out. I’ve walked around Los Angeles very tired and very late at night, and I look at Collateral and think, yeah, it does kind of feel like that. Michael Mann clearly knows this.