Collateral Reviewed

By Jeffery Vail Aug 9, 2004, 14:36 GMT

The weirdly-titled Collateral, the latest film from director Michael Mann, stars Tom Cruise as a hitman and Jamie Foxx as the mild-mannered L.A. cabbie whose cab Cruise commandeers. Foxx, who dreams of starting a limousine company and someday stretching out on a desert island, is forced at gunpoint to ferry Cruise’s icy contract killer around town and keep the meter running while he whacks five people who are helping the feds bust up a Central American drug cartel. (We’re never really told why Cruise didn’t just drive his own lazy ass around in an inconspicuous rental, which probably would have allowed him to get his work done in a third of the time and also would have kept him from having to worry about the cabbie witnessing his crimes, trying to escape, talking to the dispatcher, messing with his plans, crashing the car, etcetera.)

Tom Cruise snarls a bit but it is nothing new from him

That’s pretty much all the plot you’re going to get with this film, and all the character development too, now that you mention it. The rest is just “style” and “cool,” two words associated with Mann ever since he executive-produced the ’80s cop show Miami Vice. In fact, Collateral is stylishly cool in the same way that Miami Vice was, which is to say, hopelessly dorky.  The coral-and-aqua ensembles and sockless loafers that made the detectives of Miami Vice so stylishly cool are long gone, but in Mann’s new movie we are nevertheless made to feel the pulsing heart of the city by means of pointless, jittery close-ups of neon signs, lots of aerial views of skyscrapers at night, and  a cheesy rock soundtrack (it felt like any minute Glenn Frey was going to start singing “You Belong to the City”).  If you really admire this kind of “style,” you might as well stay home and watch a Lexus commercial.

The cabbie and hitman are both poorly-written, paper-thin characters, but Foxx fills in the gaps as best he can, adequately conveying fear, tension, confusion, and a certain humility. Cruise just mugs for the camera, as usual. He sneers, frowns, clenches his teeth, and delivers each line pretty much the same way he does every other. I’ve noticed a lot of feature pieces in the newspapers and corporate zombie magazines this week about Cruise, and, gosh, how interesting it is that he’s playing a villain for a change.

It would have been, if playing against type had brought anything at all new to his acting style. When good-guy actor Henry Fonda played the murderous Frank in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, it was an astonishing transformation. But never for a second in Collateral do you believe that Tom Cruise is anyone other than Tom Cruise with a different haircut, and ladies and gentlemen, that ain’t acting.

Jada Pinkett Smith plays the only other halfway significant character in the movie, a beautiful prosecuting attorney who takes a ride in Foxx’s cab in the film’s first scene. She and Foxx exchange pheromones in a mild sort of way, and she gives him her card and disappears. The next fare is the hitman. I don’t want to ruin the “surprise” that happens in the final third of the movie, but suffice it to say that that the viewer will look back on that first scene with Pinkett Smith as a Really Stupid Coincidence.
 
 

Jamie Foxx does well to bolster the script

This is the kind of movie where the hitman insists on taking time out from his cold-blooded killing spree to accompany the cabbie on a visit to his sick mother in the hospital. This is the kind of movie where the hitman teaches the cabbie life lessons from the back seat, where they both end up discussing their childhoods and whether or not the cabbie has enough ambition.

This is the kind of movie where one hitman with a pistol takes out a whole disco full of armed bodyguards, drug dealers, FBI guys and cops, somehow effortlessly steps through a massive throng of screaming, panicked clubgoers all crowding through the front door, climbs in to Foxx’s cab (why didn’t the stupid cabbie manage to escape in all the confusion?) and drives off, and not only are there no cops stationed outside the club ready to chase them but nobody takes down the cab’s license plate number.

This is the kind of movie where we are supposed to accept that Cruise’s character is cool because he wears dark glasses and is a big jazz fan. Unfortunately, he’s not so much a jazz fan as a jazz bore, the kind of pretentious, pontificating white guy who likes to rattle off all the important dates in Miles Davis’s life and probably has all his CDs arranged in alphabetical order. 

 One last bit of stupidity deserves honorable mention. The vicious drug lord who tells a story about Santa Claus. Watch for it.   

 More enjoyable than the film were the occasional comments of a three-year-old in the audience, who went “BLEAH!” at all the right moments. Smart kid.