Collateral (2004)
Directed by Michael Mann
Cab driver Max picks up a man who offers him $600 to drive him around. But the promise of easy money sours when Max realizes his fare is an assassin.
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42 films that influenced Collateral
What critics say influenced Collateral
I may be reading too much into the Vincent-Max relationship, but it has echoes of Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece, “Persona.”
Educated and unforgivably articulate, wearing an exquisitely tailored, miraculously wrinkle-proof gray suit that recalls Cary Grant's in "North by Northwest," Vincent indulges in endless speculation about the cosmic significance of his occupation.Sometimes Vincent sees himself as a rebel against stifling conformity.
The tone of the film harkens back to Mr. Mann's 1986 "Manhunter" (in fact Mr. Cruise's salt-and-pepper locks evoke "Manhunter" star William Petersen).
Viewers will be frequently reminded of his previous films from Ali to The Insider , from Heat to Manhunter .
While it's not so ooky as the taut doppelganger relationships in Mann's superb Manhunter or even Heat, it's a connection that inspires consideration.
Michael Mann ("Heat"/"Manhunter"/"Ali") directs an excitingly tense noirish photographed crime thriller that works despite being built around an implausible premise, the hokey coming together of coincidences at every turn to move the plot along, and a trite story.
The meter is running... Michael Mann abandons the fact-based undercurrent of his last 2 films ("The Insider" and "Ali") and returns to the genre that made him a household name with 1981's "Thief" and 1986's "Manhunter."
That is the character attribute that has fascinated Michael Mann throughout his career, which has encompassed such films as "Thief", "Manhunter", "The Last of the Mohicans", "Heat", "The Insider" and "Ali" and it is the one that he never tires of exploring.
Unlike Frank Capra's Oscar-winning 1934 delight "It Happened One Night," which took place over the course of several nights, "Collateral's" action really does happen one night, its central characters teetering precariously on the high-tension wire that passes for life in L.A. (At least in a Michael Mann movie.)
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Los Angeles is a, if not the, main character here, as alive and seething as Martin Scorsese's New York of After Hours and Taxi Driver , Philip Kaufman's San Francisco of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Nicolas Roeg's Venice of Don't Look Now.
Los Angeles is a, if not the, main character here, as alive and seething as Martin Scorsese's New York of After Hours and Taxi Driver , Philip Kaufman's San Francisco of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Nicolas Roeg's Venice of Don't Look Now.
Not since John Boorman?s "Point Blank" has the City of Angels looked so gorgeously terrifying and I suspect that years from now, when people are compiling lists of the best-looking films, "Collateral" will be assured of a high ranking.
One of my favorite scenes in Paul Schrader's script of Taxi Driver (1976) is when Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle seeks out a philosophical cabbie called the Wizard (Peter Boyle) to try to come to terms with his freaky spiritual dislocation.
In "Collateral," Jamie Foxx plays Max Durocher, a Los Angeles taxi driver (and, before there are any further comparisons to Scorsese films, let it be said that Max is far more easy-going and friendly than the infamous Travis Bickle of "Taxi Driver") who fantasizes about owning a first-class limo company he would call Island Limos.
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Cruise is used to maximum effect here, nicely cast against type (a la Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West ), but he lacks Fonda’s gravitas.
If the one constant of Mann's cinema is that a man with a certain code is placed into a situation where that code is in crisis - and it seems perfectly easy to me to apply that theme to each and every one of his features, from the TV movie The Jericho Mile through the otherwise uncharacteristic period films The Keep and The Last of the Mohicans , all the way up to Ali 's story of a man who gives up success for his beliefs - we find in Collateral a variation on that theme that gives it added interest, coming so far into his career: in this movie, we have a man with a code who is a bad man, and a man with no particular code being forced, at long last, to develop such a code.
In hindsight, knowing the kind of film that Michael Mann "ought" to make, The Keep seems like an inexplicably bizarre tangent for the future director of Heat and Collateral , wedged into his filmography like a square peg in a round hole to a degree that The Last of the Mohicans dares not even dream about.
While it's preferable to Mann's "The Keep" and "Ali", it's still nothing for 'ol Michael to write home about.