Collateral: Damaged
- Review By:
- tpb
- Date:
- December 9, 2008
- Movie:
- Collateral
- Director:
- Michael Mann
- Released:
- 2004
- Good Guy:
- Max Durocher
- Played By:
- Jamie Foxx
- Bad Guy:
- Vincent
- Played By:
- Tom Cruise
- MPAA Rating:
- R
- Family Friendly Ages:
- Not for kids
Collateral was surprisingly better than anticipated, and the credit for most of that goes to Jamie Foxx. Foxx plays the everyman well, and, in this case, he brings more to the role than what seems to be offered on paper. A hit man named Vincent (Tom Cruise) arrives in Los Angeles and hails Max Durocher's (Jamie Foxx) cab for a killing spree field trip. Max has entrepreneurial dreams to convince himself that driving a red eye cab every night is a temporary job. Vincent, we are told, has already found his calling. Tom Cruise plays Vincent much like he plays another character in a different Tom Cruise movie... wait... no... not different... that's every Tom Cruise movie. Nothing new here. He's got the mega-watt smile; the intense, menacing, clipped way of spitting out directives; slick martial arts and weaponry handling; and not much else. The script gives Vincent/Cruise opportunity to open up and show a little humanity, but either he isn't capable, or his character is too one-dimensional to pull it off. On the other hand, the filmmakers seem to want the Foxx/Max character to be summed up in simple 'my mother is controlling and I'm too fearful to act' cliches, and Foxx manages to bring depth and humanity to the role in spite of those character development confinements.
Ultimately, Collateral suffers from too many plausibility problems and ends up burying itself in the 'No way can this be viewed a second time' rack. To begin with, there never seems to be anyone else on the streets of LA when these two are in the middle of a shoot-out or other mayhem-drenched activity. The jam-packed nightclub scene is just preposterous; there is no way those two should have walked away from that chaos. The dead guy was left in the trunk all night and neither one of them seemed to remember he was there. Vincent enters an office building in the middle of the night, and in minutes finds just the right conduit in the basement to cut to shut off all electrical power to the building. On top of that – and luckily for him - the emergency generators never turn on. Still, he manages, in the pitch dark, and in seconds flat, to make his way from the basement to the 16th floor and the exact location of his victim. These plot problems may all seem trivial but they add up quickly. In the world of preposterone, the fewer questions the viewer asks about plot contrivances the better. By this measure alone, Collateral comes up a little too short.
