The Unseen Movie Review

Collateral

For many film buffs, Tom Cruise’s immense popularity seems inexplicable. He has little in the way of charm or charisma, and rarely appears to bother putting in a good performance or taking on challenging parts– with perhaps the sole exception of the otherwise dire Magnolia. Here, as with Magnolia, Cruise is playing against type – even for once allowing himself to look like the middle-aged man he now is – and his gamble is a huge success. Luckily, unlike with Magnolia, the rest of the film is just as good as Cruise’s star turn.

Set in a gloomy night time Los Angeles, Cruise is Vincent, a cold-hearted hitman working for a drugs cartel, charged with bumping off a range of federal witnesses before a court case hits. Needing a ride around town, he hops into the taxi of the prissy and nervous Max (the up and coming comedian Jamie Foxx). Thus begins a frenzied dash through the city in which Max finds himself caught in the middle of a bloody road trip where bullets from either side of the law could end his life in the blink of an eye.

Unlike so many films these days, this does not seem overlong for all its two hours. The pacing here is spot-on, with each new development and each new hit spiralling on from each other in a delicate pirouette of plotting with Cruise’s near-superhuman assassin firmly at the epicentre. Foxx’s cabbie would, in any other film, be indanger of getting overwhelmed, but the former comedian holds his own nicely, matching Cruise’s charm and brute physicality with a casual likeability that easily demonstrates why he so very nearly got the Cuba Gooding Jr role in the earlier Cruise flick Jerry Maguire.

Directed by Michael Mann, this is closer to his frenetic thriller Heat than his more recent outings Ali and The Insider, but demonstrates just as amply his superb understanding of cinema. Far from being the bog-standard car chase and homicide thriller that a lesser director could so easily have produced with this material, Mann raises this tale of a taxi driver’s bad customer far above the standard Hollywood fare. (Sorry – that pun was terrible…)

This vision of LA is closer in style to the New York seen countless times in Martin Scorsese’s films, rather than the bright and sunny paradise that is normally seen on screen. It is almost as if Mann is deliberately aping that other movie about a cabbie’s bad day, the classic that is Taxi Driver. The other major similarity is not to a film at all, but to the superb Hitman computer game series.

The only trouble with the film, perhaps due to the computer game similarities, is that Cruise’s assassin almost appears indestructible. By the final reel it is almost as if he has put a cheat code on, and can no longer be harmed by his myriad opponents. Plus towards the very end, a couple of coincidences seem just a tad too convenient to be fully believable. But these small flaws do not in any way spoil what is otherwise a highly entertaining, adrenaline-fuelled potential future action thriller classic which is almost enough to make you understand just why Tom Cruise is as famous as he is. More of this sort of thing!

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM