Collateral vs The Trailer For Taxi

Is there an actor currently working who can run as fast as Tom Cruise? I'm betting there's not. Tom Cruise, I'm here to tell you, can run. And not even in sneakers. We're talking wing-tips here. In sneakers, I don't even wanna think about it. Remember how fast you could run when you were a kid? You'd be eating Tom Cruise's dust.

Collateral is the latest movie starring Tom Cruise, and I think it just might be his best. I know I'm prone to overstatement, but Collateral is the most satisfying movie I've seen this summer. It's amazingly well-balanced mix of intimate character study and crime thriller.

We see Cruise briefly at the beginning of Collateral, making a briefcase switch at an airport, but the first portion of the movie belongs to Jamie Foxx. Foxx plays Max, a career taxi driver with aspirations to own his own limo company. His passenger is Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith), a busy attorney on the brink of a huge new case. Their scene is not what I expected. It's quiet and friendly and intimate. It's like something out of Lost in Translation, or maybe the brief, sweeter moments of Leaving Las Vegas. They're flirty, but not in a forced movie way. Their conversation is the type you might have with a person you don't expect to see again. In any other movie, if this woman had given her number to the taxi driver, I wouldn't have bought it. Pinkett Smith and Foxx are subtle and touching in the scene though, and had me smiling, wishing maybe the movie were just about them.

And then Max meets Vincent, who is now at Annie's building, and needs a ride. Vincent is nice and well-dressed, with his hair and suit the same shade of silver. He tries small-talk with Max, and though they don't hit it off right away, there's something about Max that Vincent likes. He's quiet and smart, maybe, or maybe he seems desperate or sad. Vincent points out that Max is a doer, instead of a talker, and that seems to be enough. He offers Max seven hundred dollars—twice his daily profit—to be his personal driver for the entire night. Five stops, back to the airport by morning.

You've seen the trailer, so you know that Vincent is a hit-man. He's calm and professional, but he messes up the first hit. The victim falls out a window, and lands on the roof of Max's taxi. Max can't believe the mess he's gotten into, and tries just giving Vincent the taxi, but a deal's a deal. The body's put in the trunk, and they're on to number two on the list. Vincent gives the address, Max drives, and they check off names. That's what I would have to do if I was a hit-man. I have no sense of direction, so I'd need a driver. I couldn't just hop in a truck like the Bride. I'd at least have to get on Mapquest or something.

So, there's a few typical places this movie could go. We could find that Vincent is actually some sort of good guy; like maybe he's got a good heart, or he's secretly working for the government or something. Maybe Max could help him out of a jam at one point, and be exhilarated by this spike in his normal boring evening. They could jump the cab over shit and be all “You're crazy! Oh man, I can't believe I'm doing this! My boss is gonna kill me! YEEE-HHAAAW!” Vincent and Max don't share any laughs in Collateral, and they don't have fun. They're not excited or energized or becoming friends. Collateral is not a buddy movie. Collateral is not Midnight Run or Bulletproof or Conspiracy Theory. Max and Vincent are two men doing two very different jobs, and for one night, they are partners. Collateral is a dark, seedy, dirty, violent, scary, fantastic movie.

Michael Mann directed Collateral, and while his movies are often exciting (Heat) or rich in characterization (The Insider), I don't think I've seen one that was as pure a mix of the two. Max and Vincent are consistent for the entire movie. Max never stops being weary or nervous, Vincent is always determined to finish the task at hand. They have moments where the conversation dips into the philosophical, and the two even become somewhat comfortable with each other (especially in a moment in a jazz bar, where Vincent presents an entire scenario as its exact opposite, then reveals his true intentions in a shocking fashion you might want to get used to). There's always tension though, because as long as the two men are together, there's always another hit. Max and Vincent need each other as much as they want to be apart, and the only way to solve either is to barrel on through that list. And boy, do they. Collateral is a marvel of pacing. The taxi scenes never drag or feel talky, and the action scenes never feel out of place. There are moments of action and violence in Collateral that are exhilarating. Vincent is an expert with a gun, and doesn't care where he is when the time comes to use it. Vincent, by the way, is the fast-running Tom Cruise I mentioned earlier. Tom Cruise, I'm here to tell you, is a bad-ass. Good guys playing bad is pretty common. I've already heard Collateral compared to Training Day and The Road To Perdition, but Tom Cruise's Vincent isn't a regular man with an unfortunate job, or a man who started out doing good but let the power go to his head. Vincent is a bad man who does bad things, and Tom Cruise is excellent in his portrayal. Likewise, Jamie Foxx finds depths in his character that I don't think we would have gotten with just any actor. The camera is right in his face for most of the movie, and Foxx underplays the entire time, letting the script work, letting the conversations flow and the plot tick away step-by-step, until about half way through the movie, when we realize he's the one in charge. There's a scene in a hospital with Max's mom, when it becomes clear that this is a movie about Max. Later, in a club, Max almost gets away, when a cop played by Mark Ruffalo (one of the surprises of the movie. Nobody told me he was in this. Know who else? Javier Bardem. No one tells me anything. Thanks for nothing, Collateral trailer) gets him to the door, and he's almost safe, and it occurred to me that with all Vincent's gunning and knifing and kicking and snarling in the club, it was Max that I was the most curious about. What's a guy like that do, when he really shouldn't get lost in a crowd, but probably really wants to?

And so, I think you should definitely see Collateral. Maybe go on and rent Training Day or The Road to Perdition, or even Midnight Run. It's pretty funny. Before Collateral, though, I saw a trailer for a movie called Taxi, and it has a plot that sort of humorously mirrors Collateral. It's wacky, I tell ya. Taxi, if you don't know, is the story of an overenthusiastic cop, played by Jimmy Fallon. A cop. Played by Jimmy Fallon. He can't drive, see, so his chief--Jennifer Espisito, in a fake tan and low-cut blouse—tells him he can no longer drive on the job. What's a guy to do? Well, that goofy cop is on foot for a while, until he gets wind of a sexy bank robbery. You heard me, the bank robbers are sexy women. They're all Victoria Secret-looking…and they're thieves! In fast cars! How's Jimmy gonna stop ‘em? Why, he's gotta commandeer a taxi. But this is no ordinary taxi, this is a souped-up Cannonball Run-style taxi, that transforms, like the Batmobile, into Taxi. It's driven by Queen Latifah, and she is full of wisecracks. It's gonna be a hoot. White guy playing against type, riding in a taxi with an African American driver against her will? Sound familiar? The similarities, I'm guessing, stop there. Victoria can keep a secret, but Taxi's trailer can't: This looks like shit. It's not fair to grade a movie I haven't seen, so no grade for you, Taxi. EVER. Consider yourself lucky. No doubt those unlucky Taxi audience members are gonna be feeling like Max, wondering if they should just flip the damn thing and get it all over with.

Collateral: A
Taxi (trailer only): F