Collateral (2004)

Image credit: Collateral: Frank Connor

A FARE TO REMEMBER Cruise takes Foxx on a wild ride in Mann's thrilling ''Collateral''

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Collateral

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No formula for popcorn moviemaking has grown quite as stale as the buddy action comedy. The worn-to-the-bone spectacle of two men, usually cops, occasionally from opposite sides of the law, yoked together despite their differences (white versus black, straight arrow versus wild card) is a genre that has curdled into slick hypocrisy, since the thrust of every buddy movie is that both men, deep down, are really the same. In effect, they add up to a two-headed monster that won't stop yapping at itself.

Collateral, Michael Mann's tensely funny and alive Los Angeles night-world thriller, is, in its own twisty way, a very high-stakes buddy movie, yet it doesn't look like one, because it leaps off from a situation more jangled and threatening than we're used to. This time the ''buddies'' really are at odds. Vincent (Tom Cruise), a contract killer who dispatches victims with the ease of a yuppie stockbroker ordering a round of drinks, is trying to eliminate five witnesses in a drug case during the space of just 10 hours. He needs to get around quickly, and so, as the dusk melts into the evening, he offers $600 to Max (Jamie Foxx), a very mellow cabbie who knows the flowing car-jam patterns of the L.A. grid as if they were mapped out on his brain like an air-traffic-controller's panel. As Max sits parked in an alleyway, the hitman's first victim lands, with a bloody crash, on his windshield. At that point, the cabbie is stuck. He's forced to help stow the body in the trunk, and he becomes Vincent's hostage and driver, as well as his wary pupil in casual Nietzschean self-glory.

There's a world of difference between a movie that plays a situation as...a situation, and one that inspires us to think, ''What, exactly, would I do in this predicament?'' ''Collateral,'' a propulsive action morality play, generates suspense by dividing our sympathies in clever and unexpected ways. Vincent, whose silver-gray suit is exquisitely coordinated to his hair and designer stubble, both of which look crafted from iron filings, is presented as a cool scoundrel, but he's got Max's number; he mocks him -- rightly -- for not having the courage to pursue his dream of launching his own deluxe limo service. Cruise gets to deliver one of those literate-sociopath speeches about how killing someone isn't that big a deal, since most of us don't blink an eye at all the slaughter on the nightly news. An actor can't put over dialogue like that unless he's embraced the allure of its meaning, and Cruise, with his perfectly angled delivery, gives it just the right touch of icy conviction.

Max, doing what it takes to survive, is forced to help Vincent out of tight spots (as when they're stopped by a couple of cops), and we find ourselves rooting for him -- or is it both of them? -- to succeed. Stopping off at a jazz club, the two have an after-hours drink with a veteran trumpeter (Barry Shabaka Henley), who's inspired by Vincent to reminisce about the time he got to play with Miles Davis. Just as we're lulled, the reverie crashes, at which point you may realize that you like Vincent, and also hate him, and also dig watching the way his ruthlessness awakens Max from his sweet underachiever's stupor, forcing him to rely on his guts. Foxx plays Max as a benign loner with a center of honorable sadness; he has a no-frills humanity. The actor wins us over during a long early sequence in which he gives a ride to Jada Pinkett Smith, as a neurotically multitasking U.S. attorney, and the two joust into the flirtation zone without quite realizing it. As the film goes on, Max and Vincent are drawn by Vincent's treachery into each other's worlds, yet they remain very much who they are. They never become the two-headed monster.

Shot almost entirely after dark in Los Angeles, ''Collateral'' keeps surprising us, and that's what makes it a zesty night out. It's been a while since Michael Mann turned away from Big Subjects (''Ali,'' ''The Insider''), and the break from significance does him good. He knows how to make the quietest encounters, like Max's face-off with an angry drug lord (Javier Bardem), simmer and combust, yet the tone stays light; the movie scrambles comedy and bravado in a way that's reminiscent of ''48 HRS.'' I do wish, however, that ''Collateral'' didn't slip, during its last 45 minutes or so, into a more impersonal, revved-up mode of cat-and-mouse suspense. Mann is a whiz at this stuff, yet it comes off as obligatory, and the play of personality that's the film's strong suit gets notably tamped down. Cruise and Foxx are so good together because they allow the two characters to get under each other's skin. They're buddies and enemies at the same time. They should have stayed that way.