Jamie Foxx drives Tom Cruise around L.A. under duress in Michael Mann's 2004 film Collateral. There's Mann's typical neon drenched city footage coupled with a cool score along with a surprisingly philosophical screenplay. I was pleased.
It feels like the movie was following a line of thought in American cinema. It kind of feels like a movie in which Dante from Clerks meets Tyler Durden from Fight Club. Foxx plays a cab driver named Max who has the misfortune of picking up a hitman with errands to run called Vincent, played by Tom Cruise. Like Dante, Foxx has grown comfortable in his low wage job and has pushed his bigger aspirations into the pipe. When Vincent's not executing people, he takes time to rebuke Max's boss over the CB for unfair demands. Max may be in fear of his life, but maybe he learns a little about gumption from the psycho.
With the cab rides and plot elements that end up involving the subway, it feels like this story was originally meant to be set in New York. Maybe Mann changed the location because L.A. suits his temperament better. Ah, I see on Wikipedia now that earlier drafts of the screenplay indeed had the story set in New York.
Cruise is good as a psycho. It could be argued he doesn't have much range as an actor but what he can do, I think, can be applied to a lot of different characters. That sense of intense, unshakable confidence is as effective in a hero as it is in an absolutely amoral serial killer. I guess he's playing a less amiable Lestat in this movie. He starts to get Lovecraftian (or, as Max puts it, "Twilight Zone bullshit") when he starts talking about a cold cosmos that doesn't care if Foxx is a good man or not. I guess it's like "The Enemy Within", the episode of Star Trek in which Kirk is split in two: one Kirk being aggressive and ruthless, the other being empathetic but ineffectual.
Collateral is quite good. It's available on The Criterion Channel.
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