Director Michael Mann delivers the noir goods in Collateral, a moody nocturnal thriller bolstered by fine performances, writes Michael Dwyer.
Michael Mann's last two movies were factually based pictures that disappointed for different reasons, despite containing fine individual sequences and performances - The Insider lopsidedly misplaced its emphasis on the reporter rather than the story, and the boxer biopic Ali was undermined by its sprawling structure and ultimately failed to get to grips with its fascinating subject.
Mann's earlier work (chiefly, Thief, Manhunter and Heat) made it clear that his forte is working within the thriller genre, and he makes a vibrant, stylish return to those roots in Collateral, which, while primarily a thriller, operates both as a compelling character study and as a thoroughly compelling mood piece.
The movie nods to other genres along the way, opening in the style of an incipient love story as night falls on Los Angeles and a bond unexpectedly forms between Max (Jamie Foxx), a taxi driver who expresses his dream of owning a limousine rental company, and his passenger (Jada Pinkett Smith), a fast-rising lawyer who reveals her professional insecurities.
That naturally developed and impeccably sustained scene is followed by a shift of tone as Max accepts his next fare: Vincent, a chatty, confident man played by a bearded Tom Cruise with silver-grey hair that matches his smart designer suit. Max learns too late that Vincent is a cold-blooded contract killer whose schedule involves murdering five people before flying out of the city at sunrise.
When Max dares to question these homicidal activities, Vincent bluntly justifies his profession, asking if Max is so concerned about a few anonymous murders in Los Angeles, why does he not bat an eyelid at TV news reports of genocide in Rwanda?
Shot mostly with high-definition digital cameras, Collateral invokes yet another genre, film noir, capturing a sinister nocturnal world as Max reluctantly drives his ruthless passenger through the night, from one bloody assignment to another. Mann's trademark flair for setting up and executing set-pieces is evident time and again, chiefly in a simmering, low-key sequence set in a jazz club, and soon afterwards in an extended sequence of accumulating tension building to a complicated assassination attempt in an Asian nightclub.
It is unfortunate, then, that such an accomplished movie finally loses its momentum, drifting towards a conventional and obvious resolution.
The movie features impressive performances. Foxx, a former TV and stage comic who showed his dramatic mettle in Any Given Sunday, is outstanding. Cruise is agile, alert and intense, and the ubiquitous Mark Ruffalo makes every moment count in his few scenes as an undercover narcotics detective.
In addition, the movie offers three memorable cameos from actors with just one scene each: Barry Shabaka Henley as an ageing jazz trumpeter, Irma P. Hall (from The Ladykillers) as Max's feisty, hospitalised mother, and Javier Bardem as the single-minded leader of a drugs cartel.
