Movie Review – Collateral

Collateral (2004)
Written by Stuart Beattie
Directed by Michael Mann

We end our brief survey of neo-noir films with this crime flick from Michael Mann. I wouldn’t say I adore all of Mann’s work, but I would never question how gorgeous his movies look. He invented an aesthetic we mainly associate with the 1980s yet kept with it for the next few decades. Whether the scripts work or not, Mann will deliver a moody, atmospheric experience, and that is half of what most noir stories are. You need to feel the seediness and grime for the story to work its magic. Mann accomplishes something even more impressive here, he got Tom Cruise to play the villain.

Max (Jamie Foxx) is an L.A. cab driver who dreams of starting a limousine business. He plans to keep working and saving up, and one day, he’ll make it happen. One night, Max picks up a fare that will change his life. Vincent (Cruise) says he’s in the city for one night to complete a real estate deal. He convinces Max to ferry him across town to all his stops because the cabbie knows the place well. The first stop reveals how badly Max should have said no as he ends up forced to hide a dead body in his trunk by Vincent. It turns out he’s not here for a real estate deal but to take out several witnesses and others involved in a trial against Vincent’s client.

At this story’s core, there is a conflict in how we view the world. Vincent lives in a state of pure, acidic nihilism. He argues that humanity is full of duplicitous liars, and as soon as you think someone is “good,” you’ll learn about something terrible they did. In this way, he justifies his work as a hired killer. Countering that is Max, who has big unrealized dreams & that humans, while deeply flawed, have overflow with beauty. We can see how Mann sides with Max through how he films Los Angeles. It would be very easy to film an urban space in the States in a manner that made it a hellscape. Mann has never done that. From Chicago to Miami to Los Angeles, he is a filmmaker who acknowledges the darkness. But every death matters in a Mann film.

Vincent relates a story that he believes speaks to the world’s truth. A man died while riding the Los Angeles subway system. The corpse rode the train for six hours before anyone even noticed. Vincent claims this is a story about the insignificance of human life. We are disposable from his perspective. Max takes a different lesson from this story. The anecdote is about the depth of human apathy, a learned behavior. It’s hard to argue that the institutions that run America do not reinforce it. However, apathy is something we can unlearn. Compassion and empathy can replace it. This is Collateral’s central theme – which man’s philosophy will win?

The look of Collateral was quite revolutionary for its time. Several scenes were shot using the Viper FilmStream HD Camera, making it one of the first major films to use digital photography. If you were watching movies around this time, you could tell when something was shot digitally instead of on film. The image has a graininess, a texture that feels more like video than film. In many instances, this took me out of films at the time because they didn’t look like movies. However, the Collateral’s atmosphere benefits from this grittiness. It takes cinematic personas like Cruise and Foxx and grounds them more in the real world.

We need Vincent and Max to be as authentic as possible because the ideological battle they are fighting is one we go through daily. Noir is a genre meant to explore the dark corners of the human mind and experience, to see characters face the darkest days of their lives and, more often than not, fail to overcome them. There’s an argument to be made that Vincent is the protagonist and Max is his opposition. It’s the rare case where the audience will likely root against the main character. We see Vincent first; his story has the most straightforward finality.

I want to acknowledge the outstanding Tom Cruise performances from around this time. You have films like Eyes Wide Shut, War of the Worlds, and Magnolia. Even he steals the show with a comedic turn in Tropic Thunder. The actor has slid into a generic action star for the near future, and I believe that is a massive loss. It’s very easy to dunk on Cruise the celebrity because he is very cringe, and the Scientology thing is weird as hell. However, he is damn good when you give him strong material, and he works with a great director. Cruise absolutely nails Vincent in this movie, presenting a genuinely evil yet charming villain. I don’t expect to see this again anytime soon, but we are missing out now that Cruise doesn’t take on more challenging parts anymore.

If we view this as Max’s story, part of what Vincent serves as is an ironic motivator. When the hitman learns about Max’s limousine plans and dreams of an island getaway, he chastises him. He points out how little progress Max has made in this regard. He’s just a cabbie like he was last year, the year before, and further back. The corpse on the train is Max at the point in his life when he meets Vincent. He’s a dead person going in circles, and there’s no one to notice. In this way, Vincent disproves his nihilism by caring enough to call Max out on being too scared to make a move. 

We never see if Max makes his dreams come true, but it is evident that he has changed at the end of the film. He isn’t someone who just carries people to their destinations. Life is coming into focus with him, and it took this unknowing push by Vincent to make it happen. Max also shows Vincent that the hitman’s lifestyle is the dead end. The hired killer becomes the subject of the story he enjoyed telling, a corpse on the L.A. subway going around and around for hours. We realize that Max is the free one, fooled into living a captive life. Vincent is actually imprisoned. His life is one of nothing but death where even his love of jazz can’t be kept pure, it becomes tainted in blood, too.

Collateral is not a perfect film. The second act drags on for a little too long. The movie starts with a big surge of energy and then slows down way too much. The subway sequence woke me back up, and they obviously spent a lot of time blocking and pacing that set piece. The picture is an excellent example of Michael Mann’s love of urban spaces. No one shoots these environments at night with as much beauty & love as he does. Here’s hoping Cruise decides to play a bad guy again one of these days.