Collateral

While I admit that not every major movie needs to have Oscar caliber performances and subtitles I do expect a modicum of entertainment for my exorbitantly priced movie ticket. Unfortunately Collateral did not deliver $8.50 worth of entertainment and I was left thinking that my movie buddy and I would have been better left spending our $17 on a DVD of something I would have liked and could have watched repeatedly. My suggestion, wait for this one on DVD and then rent it some night when you have already watched all of the good stuff or there are no other new releases left.

In Collateral Tom Cruise plays a contract killer named Vincent who travels around Los Angeles for one night to carry out five murders. Now the best part of this film is LA at its best, dark, moody, the perfect place for the perfect film noir. If only the rest of the film would deliver. Rather than drive himself around in obscurity Vincent introduces a level of risk and complexity in his job by hiring a cabbie to drive him around all night. The setup is that he quietly commits these murders, offs the cabbie, and boards a plane before the police know there is a problem. Jamie Foxx in his first major non-comedic role is surprisingly deft as the trapped cab driver Max. Here he stretches his acting abilities as a career cab driver who is very good at what he does, but wishes he were more than he is.

Of course, as these things do so often in movies, something goes wrong with the first hit as the body falls out of a window onto a cab. For a very professional and seasoned assassin, Vincent seems surprised that if you shoot someone in front of a window the momentum of the bullet will propel the body out of the window. Thus Max is aware that his fare is about more than real estate and that he will really earn his $600 if he manages to live out the night. Vincent through a mixture of coercion, threats, violence, and belittling keeps Max on the job from one hit to the next as the two men learn about each other.

I liked the look Tom Cruise had, all grey from his hair to his suit. It made him look distinguished and at the same time sleazy but at least he didn’t look as stingy and sinewy as in his last few films. I’m not sure I believe that there were wolves running through downtown LA, but the analogy with Vincent is plain enough. Max is the cabbie everyone wishes they had. His cab is clean and he knows where he is going. He is courteous even when hitting on female occupants and in general a very respectable guy. The premise of the film is of course that Max must lose his respectable demeanor and rise up to take out the man who has commandeered his cab.

The first major problem was that Tom Cruise is not convincing as a highly skilled, cold as ice mercenary killer. While I admire Cruise’s desire to try something new it seems to fall flat here. Cruise seems bored and unconvincing and thus the film lacks both the cool vibe such a villain should carry, and the intensity it should have with a real bad ass antagonist. Add to this the previously mentioned plot holes where Vincent only seems skilled when it suits the story and really stupid at other times and this villain lacks punch.

The second major problem with the film is that it is very lowly paced. The audience, myself included, were fidgeting in their seats waiting through the unmemorable dialogue for something to happen. There were too many scenes of the two trying to out psychoanalyze each other without the film making much progress. What is worse is the shallow bonding the film presents between the captor and his prey when we know the film will devolve into a showdown between the two. It is really an issue of how much baiting does Vincent have to do before Max goes postal on him and take the creep out. There was one scene of the film, lasting roughly twenty seconds I did enjoy, where Max finally has it and plows the car into some construction. Of course as any police officer will tell you, if you are abducted that is the first thing you ought to do to avoid being taken to a secondary location, but I guess in movies it takes people a little longer to figure these things out.

One thing I did admire was how loud Tom Cruise’s gun was. The first reason is because it reminds me of 1980’s movies like Rambo and Terminator where the main character had the loudest gun. It is a very Western type concept that tells one person shooting from all of the others. The other reason is because it gets that much closer to realism. Guns are really, really loud but for most of us, luckily, the gunshots we hear are the sanitized ones in the movies and on television and so we forget how loud and messy and dangerous guns can be.

This was a stylized action film trying to be what it wasn’t. A thoughtful character driven battle between two strong personalities in a fight to the death is what this film thought it was, it just ending up being a long aimless ride through Los Angeles. But actors are squandered in this film on characters without personality and with nothing interesting to say. Even the action is sparse and lacking in tension, drama, or excitement. Save your money for something worth watching. My only satisfaction is that I didn’t go to one of the more expensive theaters and throw even more good money away on this vapid waste of time.