Movie Reviews
The next scene is one of the best of the entire film. As Max waits on the side of the road with a line of other taxis, waiting for a costumer, Vincent (Tom Cruise) walks directly to his car. Max isn’t paying close attention and doesn’t hear Vincent call for him. Vincent decides to just get the next cabdriver. As he walks away, Max realizes that he’s just ignored a customer. He yells for him, apologizes, and Vincent gets in the car.
Now was it by chance that Vincent just happened to come back to Max’s car, or was Max meant to yell for him to come back? If the former is true, then it is Max’s fault for what is about to happen to him. However, if the latter is true, then Max had no choice in the whole matter and he was meant to get in this situation, in which case divine fate is at fault. By the end of “Collateral” you know which one it is, and why.
Vincent is a friendly guy. As Max slows to Vincent’s destination, Vincent tells him that he’s got five stops to make through the night and needs to be at LAX by 6:00 a.m., and asks if Max would wait for him and take him to all five stops. Vincent offers $600 to the bargain, to which Max reluctantly agrees, with that limo business in mind. But what happens to him changes his whole perspective on life by morning.
Vincent is a hit man on the trail of five different people. We don’t know who, we don’t know why, but that’s not the point. The point is that Max is now his accomplice whether he likes it or not. Max and Vincent share seemingly meaningless conversations with each other in the cab, but the words spoken actually alter the others’ life. The whole film is simply amazing.
Michael Mann is a director who can summon suspense with one word. He can do it without any music in the background to go with it. He can do it when you least expect it to greater effect than any other crime director I’ve watched. Mann is a pioneer in the genre because of his backdrop, which is usually L.A. New York City is used to the point of exploitation especially in crime films, and it’s a breath of fresh air to see a different city put to good use. Mann can use that city horizon and make you like it when he wants you to, and dislike it when he wants you to. He is one of the most commanding filmmakers making movies these days, and the life of a film like this depends on just that.
Cruise, in my opinion, has been making the best films of his career in the last five years. He’s becoming less of a cliché, and isn’t afraid of using his fame to beef up his characters. In “Collateral”, Cruise is Vincent, the ultimate antihero. He plays him with a menacing quietness – never is he too loud or too soft, but he does so with such originality.
Foxx is excellent as well. His character is really, truly, the main focus of the plot. He plays Max to a point of genuine emotion. You can see the confliction in his eyes in every decision he makes throughout the film. I loved his gradual character change that provides challenges to Foxx as an actor. But he pulls it off admirably.
The script by Stuart Beattie is detailed, well-thought, realistic, and tense without subterfuge, without a bunch of unwanted material that lesser writers would stoop to, and lesser directors would accept. Beattie understands L.A. as a character rather than a city. He understands night as confrontation rather than a time of day.
“Collateral” has no sure payoff. Michael Mann knows that a payoff is unnecessary in a film like this. We as the audience don’t require one because of the revelations of the characters. Each character undergoes internal surgery in the way they view human life, in the way they view right from wrong, in the way they view each other. With an ending like that, who needs a payoff? Not me. ****