Pick of the Week: 'Collateral'

7/10/08




    Many, many crime films have taken place in Los Angeles.  Michael Mann's 'Heat' might be the greatest of them all, but even the director's epic 1995 masterpiece doesn't seem to flow from the city's sprawling streets in the same way as 'Collateral', his underrated gem from 2005.  The film is a beautifully stylized and expertly acted thriller that could have reached the highest echelons of the crime genre if not for a somewhat clumsy final chapter. 
    The beginning is just about perfect.  It follows Max (played spot-on by Jamie Foxx), a cabbie with high goals and abundant self-doubt, who picks up a gorgeous prosecutor (Jada Pinkett Smith) in his cab.  Their exchange during the ride reveals so much about the characters, especially Max, without ever feeling overly expository or long winded.  It makes you feel at home in the cab with Max by the time he picks up a well-dressed, straight-faced gentleman named Vincent (Tom Cruise).  And then, after such a warm-hearted introduction, the films takes off. 
    You see Vincent is what you could call a hitman, and he's in town for the night to knock off a few federal witnesses.  Though he intends to keep Max in the dark about his dealings, the veil is quickly lifted and the cabbie is forced to chaufer Vincent around town as the assassin goes about completing his deadly work.
    Though Jamie Foxx delivers a superb performance, the film's biggest allure is Cruise.  His quietly ferocious killer lights up the screen in every scene he's a part of.  It would have been easy for Cruise to ham it up, but he plays Vincent as an ultra-calm nihilist, a man both indifferent toward the plights of other people and downright contemptuous toward humanity as a whole.  In Michael Mann's cinematic world, good and evil are clearly defined, but the crux of his tales is the very thin borderland separating the two.  In a strange way, Vincent is both drawn to and repulsed by Max.  He scoffs at Max's sheepishness and lack of drive and yet he recognizes that the cabbie is unlike anyone else he has ever met.  As the night goes on, Max gets more assertive and resilient the more dangerous things get.  He rises to face conflicts instead of shrinking for them, and Cruise does a great job showing us that Vincent realizes this, and calculates accordingly.  His supposed patsy is becoming a worthy adversary, in no small part due to Vincent's own advice.  Max's steadfastly moralistic take on the world also begins to reveal some cracks in Vincent's emotional armor, but they are very small and don't reduce the killer to anything less than a heartless machine of death.   The relationship makes both of them more human, but they remain firmly on their respective sides of the moral fence. 
    Per usual for a Michael Mann project, the direction is incredible.  The film has a glossed yet gritty look that oozes Los Angeles style, and the shots never seem extraneous or overdone.  He paints the city as kind of a surreal fairyland, intricately connected yet mechanically disjointed.  There are cops and gangsters and damsels in distress, but they all flow from the backdrops as real, relatable figures and never ring false.  The action is terrific, though it's surprisingly infrequent.  Mann knows how to build up tension before the bullets fly, and when they do fly, the screen catches fire with a vibrant, merciless energy.  A shootout in a nightclub deserves specific note and it finds Mann in top action form.  There has literally never been a similar scene done so well (See my Top 10 Shootouts feature). 
    As stated before, the film does fall short of masterpiece status due to a somewhat clumsy finale.  When Max discovers the identity of Vincent's last target, 'Collateral' seems to switch gears into a kind of Hitchcockian cat-and-mouse suspense piece.  These scenes are done well, but they just feel like they're part of another movie, and Mann's succumbs to a few sensationalist choices that don't gel with the previous tone of the film.  The very end of it is still nicely done and very satisfying, but the previous few sequences leave you feeling sort of removed from the drama of the first three-fourths of the story. 
    It's really nitpicking when you get down to it, for 'Collateral' remains an excellent effort and a worthy entry to the Michael Mann canon.   Not quite on the same level as 'Heat', but very few crime dramas are, and this one will reward your viewing with some great thrills, another fine job from Jamie Foxx, and a truly remarkable and maniacal turn from erstwhile superstar Tom Cruise.