CORPORATE LINE: Max (Jamie Foxx) has lived the mundane life of a cab driver for 12 years. The faces have come and gone from his rearview mirror, people and places he’s long since forgotten…until tonight. Vincent (Tom Cruise) is a contract killer. When an offshore drug cartel learns they’re about to be indicted by a federal grand jury, they mount an operation to identify and kill the key witnesses, and the last stage is tonight. Tonight, Vincent arrived in L.A…and five bodies are supposed to fall.
Circumstances cause Vincent to hijack Max’s taxicab, and Max becomes collateral-an expendable person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Through the night Vincent forces Max to drive him to each assigned destination. And as the LAPD and FBI race to intercept them, Max and Vincent’s survival becomes dependent on each other in ways neither would have imagined.
Jada Pinkett Smith stars as United States Attorney Annie Farrell. Rounding out the main cast are Mark Ruffalo (“In the Cut”), Peter Berg (“Cop Land”), Oscar® nominee Javier Bardem (“Before Night Falls”) and Bruce McGill (“Runaway Jury”).
THE GOOD: Director Michael Mann has taken a story that could have been done one of two ways: big-budget blockbuster or B-movie bore. Instead Mann took this script and made it into a piece of art. It didn’t hurt that he had two wonderful artists to work with in Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx.
The brilliance of Mann is the way he starts us off with an appetizer by allowing us to tag along with Jamie Foxx instead of trying to spread the entire meal out at once.
THE BAD: The camera work is both brilliant and bad at the same time. Some of the shots look as though they were taken from a home video camera. Yes, some of the film was shot digitally, but does it have to look like some hooky episode of Taxi Cab Confessions?
There are some aspects of the film that are completely odd and ploys only to set the film up in a perfect order. Cruise, the hit man, takes Foxx into the hospital to visit his mom? This is ridiculous. With as many ways to escape as there would be in a hospital? And as many ways he could draw a crowd? What about the timing? Who visits a hospital after midnight? Not to mention Cruise often takes a licking and keeps on ticking… is he human or the terminator? Maybe it’s Foxx who is indestructible. You’ll understand if you watch the film.
FRANKLY: Even with its bad points this cast and Mann’s masterhand make Collateral a treat. Collateral is the sort of film that if you were told the plot you might think it uninteresting, but upon watching it you wonder how it ended up being better than expected.
+ Charlie Craine
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