Director Michael Mann has made an underappreciated career of peeling back the gleaming veneer of the American Dream and showing audiences the less than savory results of aspirations gone awry. Mann skillfully excavates that dark territory once again in the edgy, intense “Collateral,” opening today in local theaters.
Max (Jamie Foxx) has made a 12 year career for himself as a “temporary” cab driver in Los Angeles, his drive to own his own limousine company taking a back seat to driving other people to their own destinations. On this late night shift, however, he hits it off with one of his fares, a smart, sexy prosecutor (Jada Pinkett Smith), who likes the connection their lively debate ignites. As he drops her at her office downtown, she leaves the door open for a future meeting by giving him her business card.
His moment to relish that spark is interrupted by his next customer, Vincent (Tom Cruise), who also engages Max in conversation. A man on a mission, the suave and deliberate Vincent offers Max $600 to chauffer him around L.A. to meet various business associates before he catches an early morning flight out of town. Max initially hesitates, but he’s fueled by his encounter earlier in the evening and accepts what on any other night would have been a job-risking proposal. His luck changes in one crashing moment when he realizes that his passenger is actually a hit man, hired to take out witnesses about to testify against a drug cartel.
In anyone’s else’s hands “Collateral” would just be a pedestrian crime drama. Mann (“Heat,” “The Insider”) has a visceral talent for the genre, and in this outing he steers the film’s visual and plot devices with the bleary eye of digital video. Through Mann’s lense Los Angeles is far from a city that never sleeps, unlike its East Coast counterpart; in its twilight hours the City of Angels and its inhabitants drift in a semi-conscious state that’s more nightmare than dream. Through raw shadow and light, Mann paints the city as a desolate, lonely place — regardless of whether its inhabitants are alone on its streets or sardined on a nightclub dance floor.
That energy rubs off on the film’s cast, who generally take a subdued approach to their roles. Imagine — movie stars as actors, actually playing characters rather than extensions of themselves. In a performance that almost matches his raging self-help guru in “Magnolia,” Cruise’s Vincent is a shark in a designer suit, a predatory killer propelled by instinct. Foxx distances himself from his funny guy persona, giving Max more substance than the typical cinematic blue-collar hero; there’s a startling scene where he enters a room as one person and exits with an entirely different identity, all within a subtle shift of facial and vocal expression.
“Collateral” takes a detour into a prolonged gun battle which seems out of proportion to the rest of the picture, but that’s really a minor setback in an otherwise sharp, stylish film. This time around Mann might finally get the recognition he deserves as one of America’s best directors.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
