After more than 40 years in the movie star business, 2022 somehow finds Tom Cruise at the top of his game, with Top Gun: Maverick earning both critical acclaim and historic box office returns around the world. Whatever you might think about his wacky personal life or his predilection for high-wire action-adventure filmmaking, it’s undeniable that he brings loads of charisma to his performances. In much of his filmography, Cruise flexes his charm and his high-wattage smile as a leading man, but his more compelling roles have allowed him to play against that type, and nowhere does this work better than in Michael Mann’s moody LA noir, Collateral, released in 2004. In the role of a traveling hit man, with a grey suit and grey brush cut to match, Cruise finds a way to reverse-engineer that charisma into a kind of hypnotic menace as the very last guy you want to run into.
In previous thrillers like Heat and Manhunter, Michael Mann has displayed his predilection for stories of men pushed to their limits while on a collision course, and Collateral fits snugly within that genre. But what really drives this story (from Stuart Beattie’s taut and snappy screenplay) is the contrast between the two leads and the ways in which they alter one another’s course. Jamie Foxx brings an everyman vibe to the role of Max Durocher, a late-night cabbie with an empathetic streak that helps him read his fares. He connects with a stressed-out lawyer (Jada Pinkett Smith, doing a lot with limited screen time), who turns out to be a prosecutor on the eve of a big trial. When his next fare turns out to be Vincent (Cruise), a coldblooded killer who’s offing witnesses in that very case, it’s not so much a coincidence as just bad timing. Vincent coerces Max into driving him to all his hits over the course of the night, using a mixture of physical threat and psychological manipulation. If he weren’t a contract killer, Vincent would make an effective life coach.
For a city as thoroughly filmed as LA, Mann finds fresh angles and approaches. This was one of the first feature-length movies to be filmed almost entirely in high definition video, allowing dynamic nighttime shots that might have been impossible to pull off with standard film. Colors saturate the frame as reflections slide across windows and car fenders, and characters in the deep background emerge in sharp detail as the camera shifts focus. Mann would put these techniques to even more vivid use in Miami Vice (2006), but here it’s after-hours Los Angeles that becomes a character all its own. There’s a haunting moment when Max slows down to let a rangy coyote lope across the street, eyes aglow in the headlights. Hitman and hostage, momentarily distracted from their argument, watch the wild animal without making a comment. The creature with its sleek grey fur resembles Vincent–just another predator scavenging in the city after dark. The whole story arc takes place during the course of this one eventful night; by the time the southern California sun is coming up, the credits start rolling.
Structured as a series of brief and vivid episodes as Vincent makes his deadly rounds, the film offers a handful of indelible performances from Mark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem and–especially–Barry Shabaka Henley. As the owner of a jazz club who jams onstage with the band, he has an amiable chat with Vincent and a captive Max about jazz lore until the hitman mentions his people in Culiacan and Cartagena. Henley’s bloodhound face collapses as the threat registers. It’s a chilling moment, and a visceral way to underline Vincent’s infamy. It’s also one of the only context clues about the bigger picture of Vincent’s mission. We can infer that he’s working for Central American drug cartels, but beyond that, there’s precious little backstory or development of any of the characters beyond their words and actions on this chaotic night. It’s another feature of Michael Mann’s best films: rendering the story down to its elemental core, and letting the conflict between the characters drive everything.
Like the interplay between DeNiro’s crook and Pacino’s cop in Heat, where you’re rooting for both of them to succeed, the hitman-cabbie dyad makes for a fascinating intersection of personalities. In a strange way, Max’s terrifying night with Vincent ends up edifying his life. The hitman gleans that Max intends to start his own limousine company, and ridicules him for not doing anything about it yet, then harangues him for not calling the lawyer woman who gave Max her card. Vincent even chastises Max for not buying flowers for his own mother, then springs for the bouquet himself. He might be a bloodthirsty sociopath, but he makes a lot of good points, and Max would be smart to listen to him. This is where Tom Cruise’s natural charisma serves the portrayal so well, and he doesn’t even need his million-dollar smile to sell it.
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