Reviews
Collateral | Review
Lots of Heat
Mann’s moody, stylized feature commences well but cools off in the end with unnecessary, anti-climatic action.
Back when he was conceiving the Miami Vice world writer-director Michael Mann loaded the filmic text with the type of atmospheric compositions that put a narrative value on urban locations. In Collateral, Mann finds once again finds a lyrical beauty from the L.A. scenery – from curb side back alleys to helicopter shots of the neon-fed metropolis.
One is busy by picking up customers, putting aside the dollars and wishing upon a postcard. The other is picking off his victims; one-by-one he seals the deal with a killer’s kiss in the form of a couple of well placed bullet holes. This is the story of how two night-time wolves come together – each playing their won game of survival inside the confines of a taxi cab in a an unwarranted high jacking scenario. Jamie Foxx
(Ray) gives a surprisingly good performance as a cabby driver who’s had his meter running for quite a while and Tom Cruise (The Last Samurai) pulls out some sharp-shooting acrobatics — moves that the actor probably picked up from his last picture. Smartly devised tactical character motivations force the two together — there is no quick exit for the cab driver but what weakens the strength of the film is the accumulation of one too many calculated coincidences. Where Stuart Beattie’s script loses its edge is in the film’s final portion – where the grayed-haired villain and the blue collar worker step out of their characters – the weaker becoming the stronger and vice-versa. Javier Bardem (The Dancer Upstairs)
and Mark Ruffalo (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) are given snippets of screen time, while Jada Pinkett Smith unfortunately plays a major part in the unoriginal, high-rise version of Rear Window conclusion.
Foxx and Cruise’s characters manage to create an unlikely bond, not of the buddy-buddy type but they share a dynamism that works well when the characters are forced together in the same shot which is best felt in the smooth transition shots inside the cab and not necessarily the language within the dialogue. Mann heightens their exchanges, with subtle off-centre framing of the characters offered up in the type of digital look offered in Traffic, the only difference is that Mann wears his sunglasses at night. Mann understands how to shoot the city, his luminous detail in the visual and audio instantly creates a contemporary film noir appeal. Mann uses not one, but two cinematographers in Don Beebe and Paul Cameron to visually build the story and the night shooting perfectly matches the noir text of the film; it soaks Cruise’s character of Vincent in deep mystery. The editing moves the film at a feverish, yet methodical pace and the build up is quite enjoyable, Mann effectively makes this a thriller that is easy to get into; unfortunately, the story seriously misfires in the end giving the film two uber-cool halves and one fairly exaggerated and generic ending.
In the end, Collateral could have been the ultimate rollercoaster ride with remnants of the tempo high action in Mann’s Heat, but instead this cab runs out of gas and opts for a predictable predicament. In one sense, this is the cool thriller that viewer’s have waited for all summer long, unfortunately it has its share of problems.