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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 24.87%
Worth A Look: 40.21%
Average: 16.4%
Pretty Bad: 14.29%
Total Crap: 4.23%
15 reviews, 99 user ratings
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| Collateral |
by Luke Pyzik
"A solid thriller that is a bit too conventional for its own good"
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No one shoots a close up like Michael Mann. As a director known for capturing the gritty feel of Los Angeles, it often goes unnoticed how well he tells his stories through facial expressions. Consider his films "The Insider" and "Heat," where the tortured faces of Russell Crowe and Al Pacino are consistently captured in Mann’s uniquely composed extreme close ups. Perhaps it is the juxtaposition of these close ups with the vast exterior shots of the city that has earned Mann his reputation for turning Los Angeles into a living, breathing character."Collateral" follows a similar visual structure, but this time Mann shoots in high definition video, adding a certain sense of immediacy and an extra layer of grittiness. The film takes place over one night in Los Angeles, where a cab driver named Max (Jamie Foxx) is taken hostage by a professional killer and forced to escort him around the city to his various marks.
As Vincent the killer, Tom Cruise wears a tight silver suit and dyes his hair gray. If we did not get the point that he is “cold-as-steel,” Mann also directs our attention to an ad for Bacardi Silver that sits on top of Max’s taxi. Cruise plays Vincent with frightening intensity and an air of mystery. He lets subtle shades of humanity leak through the hard exterior, causing the audience to wonder exactly how someone as affable as Vincent ended up so soulless.
The movie is essentially episodic, with some episodes working better than others. The film takes a slight detour when Vincent demands Max visit his mother in the hospital, but perks up quickly in a virtuoso action sequence where Vincent must carry out a hit in a crowded nightclub. There are also a few moments of comic relief, like when Vincent carefully instructs Max how to tell off his boss.
Between playing cat and mouse, Max and Vincent are allowed some well-crafted scenes of focused conversation. In the claustrophobic confines of the taxi, they banter about the nature of modern life and business. The screenplay by Stuart Beattie has a breezy way with dialogue. The characters easily segue from standard captor/hostage talk ("let me go," "I can’t let you go"), to sincere musings on personal crises and troubled pasts, to clever insights about each other’s behavioral contradictions.
As bodies begin to pile up around town, Vincent and Max are pursued by detective Fanning (Mark Ruffalo), a renegade cop who figures out all the angles (are there any other kind?). Ruffalo has a thankless role - his storyline is the kind of police procedural viewers have seen in countless television shows from "C.S.I." to "Law and Order." In the hands of a lesser actor, the movie could come to a dead halt every time either Cruise or Foxx is not on screen, but Ruffalo has the kind of natural likeability that helps him sustain the movie in the few moments when he is the center of it.
Those who saw Jamie Foxx hold his own with Al Pacino in "Any Given Sunday" will not be surprised by his dramatic chops in "Collateral." Foxx truly understands this role. He is never too flashy and never to too proud to take a back seat to Cruise’s much showier Vincent, and as a result, Max becomes a relatable everyman of nearly Jimmy Stewart proportions. Considering one of the last set pieces seems a nod to "Rear Window," it would not surprise me if Mann suggested Foxx brush up on old Stewart movies in preparation for the part.In the Michael Mann oeuvre, "Collateral" falls somewhere in the middle. It doesn’t have the cinematic grandeur of "Heat" or the genre perfection of "Manhunter," but it is a solid thriller, even if it is too conventional for its own good.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=10300&reviewer=381
originally posted: 08/30/04 23:47:28
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 Sydney Film Festival For more in the 2005 Sydney Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
06-Aug-2004 (R)
DVD: 14-Dec-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
14-Oct-2004
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