"Collateral"

Tom Cruise is simply no match for Jamie Foxx and Jada Pinkett Smith in this thriller from "The Insider" director Michael Mann.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Aug. 6, 2004 | As a director of thrillers, Michael Mann has some peculiar and easily underestimated gifts. The early scenes of "Collateral," in which Jamie Foxx plays a gentle-spirited cab driver who's bullied into driving a hit man (Tom Cruise) around Los Angeles for a night, are edged with enchantment -- and when was the last time you found enchantment in the look of a thriller?

Foxx's character (his name is Max) doesn't seem to be so much driving his cab as guiding it, gondola-like. His L.A. is a city of imaginary canals and rivers, a place where water is in such short supply that it almost becomes a state of mind -- a Venice of moody nighttime blues, of silvery streetlights and Christmas-colored traffic signals.

Max picks up a passenger -- her name, he'll eventually learn, is Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith) -- and they make rickety, exasperated conversation at first, arguing about which route will be fastest. Their standard city-life bickering settles into an easy, conversational camaraderie: Before he drops Annie off, Max learns that she's a prosecutor for the Department of Justice and that the night before she has to present a case (this is one of those nights), her stomach clenches into a knot. Before she leaves Max's cab (and, in an awkwardly flirtatious move, hands him her business card), she learns that his dream is to open his own luxury-limo business. Their differences in class and station are obvious but insignificant: Each gravitates toward the intelligence and candor of the other.

The scene is a dream to watch and to listen to, for the writing and for what Mann and the actors do with it, and for the way its visuals, as in an Edward Hopper painting, capture seemingly contradictory vibes of coziness and isolation. The opening of "Collateral" is everything you want out of the movies in one compact setup: You wonder what else Mann has in store and if anything could possibly top what he's already given us.

But before long, Tom Cruise appears, and you have your answer. "Collateral" is by no means a bad or ineffective movie. It has been put together with thought and care, which used to be standard procedure in the making of thrillers but is now increasingly rare. Yet after that promising start, "Collateral" ratchets down, gradually, to being only average. Mann's visual sense never flags: Most of "Collateral" (its cinematographers are Paul Cameron and Dion Beebe) was shot digitally, using different types of specially modified high-definition cameras, and the picture's surface has an unusual texture: It's somehow crisp and velvety at once.

But the movie's narrative jostles against its visual nocturnal poetry instead of jibing with it. Mann and his screenwriter, Stuart Beattie, wrestle with some big English-lit themes. They're fascinated by the duality of seemingly opposite characters, as well as by our adherence to conventional definitions of manhood. But those ideas aren't folded into the material: They become its reason for existing, and they draw us away from the interplay between the characters instead of into it.

Next page: Tom Cruise's old-timey American work ethic