When It Comes To Creating A Top-Notch Crime Thriller, Collateral Is A Real Beauty

Tom Cruise, like fellow late 20th-century movie star Will Smith, seems to be stuck in a rut in the current stages of his career that see's him just trying to do one type of role in one type of movie (lead heroes in blockbusters) as a way to keep his career going when in fact his fame used to come from doing all sorts of different types of roles in a wide variety of genres. In fact, looking over his pre-2005 meltdown, starred in non-action films by filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson, Oliver Stone and Stanley freaking Kubrick while his three best 21st-century action blockbuster movies (Minority Report, War Of The Worlds and Edge Of Tomorrow) have him inhabiting more interesting and complicated individuals rather than the generic leads in recent fare like Jack Reacher, Oblivion, and The Mummy.


Want a reminder of just how great Cruise can be when he's playing outside of his comfort zone? Just look for his villainous turn in Collateral, a great Michael Mann thriller from 2004. The film centers on Max (Jamie Foxx), a timid guy who's been a Los Angeles cab driver for twelve years with greater aspirations on his mind. Thanks to his years of experience as a cab driver, he knows this city inside and out, particularly in what routes to take if you want to get to your destination in a hurry. He happens to pick up a client by the name of Vincent (Tom Cruise) one night who wants Max to drive him to five different spots he's going to during the night for six hundred dollars, an offer Max reluctantly agrees to.

Their arrangement seems to be going swimmingly at first...and then a dead body plops on top of Max's cab. This newly deceased man was shot by none other than Vincent, who's got five people to kill as part of a contract. Yep, Vincent is a hitman and now he's holding Max at gunpoint and forcing him to drive to an assortment of locations across Los Angeles. As the night wears on, Max grows all the more irritated at the sociopathic detached attitude Vincent carries and all the crimes he's getting him involved in while some law enforcement officers (the most prominent of whom is played by Mark Ruffalo) begin to zero in on the figure (Vincent) behind a rash of Los Angeles killings...

To put it simply, Collateral is a super thrilling rush of fun. It's just the sort of well-crafted thriller too many films aspire to be but fail to quite get there. Collateral makes such an achievement look like effortless fun, one whose most subtle accomplishments on a storytelling level really only kick in once you've finished watching it and you're running over it in your mind. Stuart Beattie's script really is a thing of beauty in terms of making this intricately woven tale of a mismatched pair united on one night of crime, with his dialogue being a particular stand-out in a screenplay stuffed with positive attributes. The majority of the screentime is devoted to conversations between Max and other characters and the high quality of Beattie's writing means the various dialogue exchanges become both absorbing and an opportunity to shed light on who these characters are in a natural manner.

Our two lead actors do a remarkable job handling the assorted excellent dialogue Beattie's composed and I love that this movie gets to serve as a major reminder of just how talented Jamie Foxx is as a performer. Foxx really feels underappreciated as an actor, and here, in his most high-profile leading role at the time (he had only headlined three small-scale movies prior to Collateral), he does a terrific job at making Max a real human being one can immediately dramatically invest in. He comes across as plenty affable, his delivery of the dialogue for his character feels totally natural (I love the way Foxx reacts to the various grisly actions Cruise's character carries out) and you really buy his ever growing sense of desperate determination. All in all, a totally sublime performance from Foxx here.

Playing the role of the baddie, Tom Cruise actually works like gangbusters in playing a far more nefarious creation than he typically portrays. Walking on-screen with silver hair (which actually looks really good on him), Cruise smartly transports the various traits he uses in many of his action movie lead roles such as ceaseless convection and assured confidence and translates those facets into a more sinister form. The very qualities that Crusie used in past heroic roles to make audiences root for him are now used to make a truly intimidating foe who has a chilling amount of experience with dishing out murder. To boot, Cruise is super convincing in making the dialogue deliveries of Vincent (a character with outspoken hatred towards the human race as a whole) feel appropriately detached as if he has contempt for the very idea of having to talk to other human beings.

These two lead performances bounce off of each other to create a riveting camaraderie that leads to some of Collateral's most tense and entertaining sequences. Director Michael Mann does a marvelous job at shepherding these performances from Foxx and Cruise as well as the whole cast for that matter (sidenote: Javier Bardem has one brief appearance here where he's so incredibly captivating that it feels inevitable he'd end up becoming a movie star). Mann also shows a talented eye for visually executing the numerous suspenseful scenes in the script with some truly inventive staging and camera work appearing here that makes a number of scenes in Collateral incredibly fun. Like I said earlier, Collateral really is a top-notch crime thriller with phenomenal lead performances and a crackerjack script. May it serve as a reminder that Tom Cruise playing outside of the box really does play to his strengths as an actor.