Collateral Review
by Mark R. Leeper (markrleeper AT yahoo DOT com)August 10th, 2004
COLLATERAL
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Jamie Foxx plays a cab driver who gets an
unusual passenger, a professional assassin who has
a list of people to kill that night. The driver
learns from the assassin how to live his life.
The passenger learns why it is better for an
assassin to drive himself, even in Los Angeles.
Tom Cruise, the assassin, adds another good
performance to his portfolio. But under scrutiny
the premise is actually absurd and script really
falls to pieces. Rating: +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
Tom Cruise long ago mastered the role of handsome lead and hero. He moved on to a variety of more complex roles like a dysfunctional maladjusted political activist, an amoral vampire, a disaffected warrior, a man who learns to love his autistic brother. Along the way his acting talent has steadily developed. He is still limited. I doubt he could convey strong emotions the way a Lee J. Cobb could. But he passed long ago the stage where he was mostly decorative.
In COLLATERAL Cruise is a calculating and systematic hired assassin. This time around he is not even the main character though he certainly is the center of attention. We see the night that the film takes place through the eyes of Max (played by Jamie Foxx), the cab driver that assassin Vincent (Cruise) has hired to take him around to his next five victims. From the Max's point of view the story is a tense thriller. The cabby has to try to save the lives of the victims and very possibly his own life. This puts him in the position of sometimes working against Vincent and sometimes working for him.
The surprise inside the story is that if we see the film through the eyes of the assassin Vincent it turns from a thriller into a shaggy dog story. Vincent, who outwardly looks so cool and professional, is really something of a bumbler. The evening goes nothing like he could have planned it. His primary error is to put the success of his assignment and his very life into the hands of an innocent bystander over whom he has so little control. We are told why he does this and it still seems a bone-headed maneuver that is not worth the risk and would likely not work the way he hopes. He gets what he deserves. (I will discuss his motive in more detail in a spoiler section following the review.) Over the course of the evening Vincent loses the data he needs for his work, he is made to look like a fool to his employers, and he ends up in the hospital visiting his driver's mother Ida (Irma P. Hall of the recent THE LADYKILLERS). At one point he has his gun pointed directly at his victim and for no particular reason he just pauses. And we quickly see why no assassin would ever do that. In the end Vincent's worst nightmare about Los Angeles comes true for him. It is unclear whether director Michael Mann and writer Stuart Beattie recognized how unprofessional the professional Vincent is. Certainly they hope the audience does not notice.
In the course of the night there is a good deal of discussion of philosophies of life. Max has big plans for his future but lies to himself about going after those goals. Vincent wants to help Max to control his life, but Vincent has his own fears. Max has his own ideas of how to handle fears, which he imparts to an earlier passenger, but is also limited by his own fears. Along these lines there is someone else we see relating to Vince and Max about the happiest night of his life.
Cruise here has prematurely grayed hair, dark glasses, a few days' growth of beard, and a knockout suit. Somehow the look is one I associate with Richard Gere. From a distance he even resembles Gere. By now Mann is an old hand at filming crime stories set in Los Angeles. Still at times his visual style seems to fight the camera's storytelling. A sequence filmed in a disco is almost incoherent.
COLLATERAL is one of those films that seem like one kind of film while you watch it and becomes a very different film with thought afterward. Still it rivets the viewer because it does not give the viewer time to think about the premise. I rate it a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10.
Spoiler ... Spoiler ... Spoiler ...
The implication is that Vincent has been successful in framing a similar driver on a similar assignment and the police had assumed that they were random killings by a cab driver who suddenly turned psychotic. But presumably in that assignment the victims were related as they are here. It seems unlikely that the police would think an amateur and psychotic would just happen to choose a related set of victims. Even if they believe that once they would never believe it twice and in fact they do not. A real professional would have driven himself or gotten a local driver he could trust. But then there would have been no story to tell.
Mark R. Leeper
[email protected]
Copyright 2004 Mark R. Leeper
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
