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
mleeper@optonline.net
Copyright 2004 Mark R. Leeper
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X-RAMR-ID: 38423
X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 1305292
X-RT-TitleID: 1134449
X-RT-AuthorID: 1309
X-RT-RatingText: 6/10
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