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Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx take a long taxi ride in Michael Mann's thriller Collateral |
Director: Michael Mann
Cast: Tom Cruise (Vincent), Jamie Foxx (Max Durocher), Jada
Pinkett Smith (Annie Farrell), Mark Ruffalo (Detective Ray Fanning), Peter Berg
(Detective Richard Weidner), Bruce McGill (Frank Pedrosa), Irma P. Hall (Ida
Durocher), Barry Shabaka Henley (Daniel Baker), Javier Bardem (Felix
Reyes-Torrena)
Tom Cruise enjoys throwing us film-goers curveballs every
now and again. In Collateral he pops
up as a sociopathic hitman, grey of hair and suit (like a buzzcut, rampaging
John Major) leaving bodies strewn about the place. It’s great to see him in
Michael Mann’s lean, very enjoyable action thriller, looking as sleek and
soulless as the rest of LA.
Cruise’s Vincent is a hitman in LA to knock off a list of
targets. But how will he get from hit to hit? Why by hiring a taxi driver for a
night: risk-averse dreamer Max (Jamie Foxx) who has been working “temporarily”
as a taxi driver while he builds plans for his dream limo business for a mere
12 years. Max is thrilled to have a big spender in his car – until something
goes wrong on hit #1 and a body lands on his cab. Max no has no choice but to
assist Vincent – although Vincent ends up becoming more attached to Max than he
might ever have imagined.
Mann shot his film on a high-definition video and it gives a
very unique look at LA, really capturing the hazy yellows and cool blues of the
city and giving everything in the picture a slightly grainier, starker look.
But that would count for nothing if the story of the film wasn’t pretty good,
and Collateral is a very effective
action thriller, which doesn’t reimagine the genre but offers more than enough
freshness to enliven the familiar elements it’s made up from.
Its main assets (along with Mann’s cool, detached and
pin-point sharp direction) are the performances of its two leads. Cruise is
just about bang-on as a professional hitman, devoid of empathy, who finds
surprising possibilities of friendship open in front of him. He’s a fascinating
character, like someone who has spent so long studying people that he can just
about replicate human reactions, without understanding the humanity behind
them. Cruise’s obsessive preparation for his roles also help makes him
flawlessly convincing as this lethal ubermensh.
Foxx however is just as good as a basically decent, friendly,
low-key guy who is kidding himself that he is not drifting through life. It’s
Max’s story we follow throughout the film – and it’s his sense of personal
morality, his strict belief in right and wrong, that gives the film its
dramatic force. Foxx also avoids undermining or laughing at Max, who is
basically a man so buttoned up and cautious that (without a major push) he’ll
clearly die of old age in that cab.
These two characters thrown together have a curious
chemistry – a sort of riff on the casual bonds that can develop between driver
and passenger as they talk about their lives, views and interests. It’s not a
friendship – certainly not in Max’s case – but it’s a strange sort of bond
nevertheless. Vincent, you feel, hasn’t talked to many people like this – and
while he’s still willing to threaten Max or put him at great risk, he still
develops a strange protectiveness about him. It’s this quirky and different
relationship that powers the film and finally makes it unique. This odd couple
don’t overcome boundaries to become bosom friends, but they also don’t come
together as fierce rivals. Instead they sort of work out a co-existence in that
cab.
It’s the most interesting thing about a film that otherwise
– to be honest – deals a pretty familiar deck with confidence. Sometimes the
film plays its cards so well you overlook them – the first time I watched it, I
was semi-surprised at the reveal of the final victim, but really it should be
pretty obvious to anyone who has seen a movie before. The plot is full of
moments like this that are played with a freshness – or with a cunning – that
stops them from feeling familiar.
But that’s really what it is. The journey around LA from
hit-to-hit is a familiar sounding idea. The encounters between Vincent and the
targets are pretty familiar – the exception being a fascinating, and hard to
read, encounter with Barry Shabaka Henley’s jazz player turned informant, which
sizzles with tension – and the action scenes, while well staged, are the sort
of shoot-outs we’ve seen before. Mann shoots them with a vibrant excitement,
but it’s mostly B-movie stuff presented freshly.
What it comes down to is that relationship between those two
characters, and the skill of director and actor in drawing out subtleties in
performance. (Don’t listen by the way to the director’s commentary, which
ruthlessly strips these subtleties away as Mann bangs on about heavy-handed,
predictable backstories which thankfully don’t make it into the movie, but make
it sound dumber than it is). Cruise and Foxx are both fantastic, Mann’s
direction of this sort of icy-cold, impersonal, dangerous city is impeccable
and the film itself doesn’t fail to entertain.
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