Collateral

 Michael Mann's 2004 Collateral combines effectively all of the elements for which this director is famous:  there are lots of shots of men running at top speed, vehicles slink through dim city streets under flaring sub-tropical skies that look like exotic fruit cocktails, and music videos punctuate the action.  Everyone labors hard for their money, including Mann's professional criminals who always have a blue-collar work-ethic notwithstanding their sleek physiques and tailor-made clothes.  The tough daily grind inspires dreams of escape in Mann's characters -- the hero in Collateral posts on his taxi's visor above his dashboard a picture of a South Sea atoll to which he wishes to escape; this is similar to James Caan's thief in Mann's first movie keeping in his wallet photographs clipped from some magazine of the ideal life to which he aspires: blonde wife and baby and house in the suburbs).  Everyone is driven by dreams of success and escape and express the Protestant view that you have to work incessantly to achieve happiness but, in fact, the very impulse to acquire good things through relentless labor taints and poisons the very objects that you desire.  Mann's pictures have a sleek, overwrought quality and they are pictorially spectacular -- you can recognize the filmmaker's work in every sequence in his films; he doesn't ever deviate from his hard, glossy style and this is, at once, Mann's greatest accomplishment as well as his greatest flaw:  his films are mostly cold with impenetrable surfaces and what you expect is always what you get.  In Collateral, an excellent example of Mann's esthetic, an alert viewer will figure out the film's crucial plot turn and the mechanics of its climax at the end of the movie's first sequence -- but it doesn't matter: the climax is what you anticipate but better.  On the other hand, there is something soul-less about a film-making style that excludes any sort of improvisation or detour or accident, a style that is story-boarded within an inch of its life.

Collateral is particularly appealing because of its classical simplicity.  A hardworking and fantastically expert taxi-driver (played by Jamie Fox) is hired and, then, coerced into chauffeuring a professional assassin (Tom Cruise) around Los Angeles from twilight to dawn -- the killer is executing a contract to murder witnesses who have been subpoenaed to testify in a drug cartel case.  His work requires five stops and, then, the taxi-driver is supposed to let him off at the airport so that he can make is getaway through LAX.  A LA detective, Fanning (Mark Ruffalo), figures out that a contract-killer is murdering trial witnesses and initiates a chase through the city streets in hot pursuit of the murderer.  There are a series of assassinations and shoot-outs and, at last, a bravura set-piece involving the killer's final victim.  (SPOILER alert: the last victim is a spunky, hardworking female prosecutor in federal court; she is the taxi driver's first fare for the night and their encounter, a classic Hollywood "meet-cute", motivates the frantic climax -- the taxi-driver risks everything to save the young woman who serves as the implicit, if never consummated, romantic interest in the film.)  The movie preserves Aristotelian unities of time and place -- the action takes between sunset and dawn across a single night and everything happens on the precisely delineated grid of streets comprising central LA; if you knew, the city, I think, you could chart the the film's events on a map (the scenario obligingly provides exact addresses).  Everything is coordinated to the plot and there are no random occurrences -- the opening meet-cute turns out to be a central pivot point on  which the plot turns, although the viewer will, at first, regard the encounter as preface to a romance not a big gunfight; similarly, a visit to a jazz club (similar to the visit to the Blues bar in Thief) also turns out to be part of the plot and not the detour advertised by the gunman.  The film is wildly entertaining and visually gorgeous -- palm trees flare melodramatically against skies that are the deep color of expensive rum; the belly of a helicopter gleams with reflected city lights; the night-time streets are sinister and glamorous at the same time.  There are too many close-ups for my taste, but Mann is so successful with these images that, after a while, I forgot my objections to this style of moviemaking.  (Mann's Public Enemies is so clogged up with close-ups that I found the movie impossible to watch on the big screen; but in Collateral, this technique seems more expressive and less intrusive.)  There are spectacular set pieces, similar to the downtown LA firefight in Heat, for instance, a big shoot-out in a disco in Korea Town filmed like a music video and the climactic sequence set in office buildings and their adjacent parking lots is a master-class in complex, but lucid, mise-en-scene using deep focus in the pre-dawn night to link actions occurring hundreds of yards apart.  The acting is excellent:  Tom Cruise with grey hair and whiskers is a philosophical world-weary assassin, a nihilist who argues that the world is completely indifferent to human suffering and that the only thing that matters is professionalism in executing one's contractual obligations.  The no less hard-working taxi-driver argues that the meaning of life is achieving one's dreams, although the killer points out that the hack is apparently willing to defer his dreams forever.  Both men claim bad parental influence and we even meet the taxi-driver's mother -- again this scene seems like a deviation from the plot's mainsteam, but, in fact, serves an important plot point in the story:  the taxi-driver has to keep assisting the murderer or the bad guy will kill his mother.  The movie plays out as a perverse buddy-film -- gradually, the taxi-driver and assassin begin to blend into one another:  the driver becomes more brutal, cunning, and amoral while, perhaps, the assassin has some second thoughts about his chosen profession.  The film is successful because, despite its glossy format, the picture eschews cartoon-style heroics.  The taxi-driver is an everyman and acts pretty much as you would expect in the circumstances -- he doesn't have any super-powers and doesn't turn into some kind of hyper-efficient action hero and killing machine.  Furthermore, the assassin, despite his professionalism, errs himself -- at one key point, he runs out of ammunition.  The transfer of qualities between the two principals in the film is integral to the movie's appeal and, indeed, at one point the taxi-driver has to  literally impersonate Tom Cruise's character, acting in that scene with even more desperate aplomb that the professional killer.  

My only cavil relating to this movie is that, when considered after all the sound and fury is concluded, the picture is somewhat implausible.  The plot turns on a wild coincidence which we accept while the movie is screening but may question later on.  Further, at the climax, the murderer becomes a bogey-man who seems to have a preternatural skill in tracking his prey -- his victims have too many places to hide and the advantage of knowing the city, but, nonetheless, the assassin successfully pursues them, sniffing a bit like wolf or tiger, scenting his would-be prey in the air itself.  A movie like this lives or dies on its claims to plausibility and I thought there was a little whiff of the incredible in the film's last reel.  Nonetheless, I recommend this picture highly.