Silver-haired Vincent hops on a random taxi with a suitcase and a mission. In the driver’s seat is a man with big dreams (Jamie Foxx), none of which involve a hitman in the back of his car. Alas, dreams rarely go to plan and, after a job goes wrong, the duo finds themselves stuck together for an adrenaline-fuelled night of murder and mayhem in downtown LA.
Cruise’s only proper villain to date, Vincent gifted the actor with the chance to flirt with violent nihilism. The murderer-for-hire punctuates threats with charming half-smirks and musings on life’s bleak purposelessness. He’s an agent of chaos, moving through Michael Mann’s visions of a nocturnal city to the throbbing beats of Audioslave. This is Cruise’s most lethal creation.
Rafa Sales Ross, bfi.org.uk
Collateral is pure pulp – a hitman ensnares a hapless cabbie into acting as his de facto chauffeur for an evening of murder and mayhem – but in the hands of high-style filmmaker Michael Mann it becomes something richer and classier. Working from a script by Stuart Beattie to which he made extensive revisions and shooting mostly on high-definition digital video cameras (the Thomson Grass Valley Viper FilmStream and the Sony CineAlta) modified to his specifications following five months of intensive pre-production work, Mann takes the viewer on a nocturnal tour of Los Angeles quite unlike any other.
In Mann’s portrait of the megalopolis, the beaches, bikinis and eternal sunshine of celluloid California are replaced by a tenuously interconnected set of zones containing Black neighbourhoods, Korean nightclubs and Latino gangsters. Our journey back and forth across the city is so well mapped – with the glass spires of downtown providing a point of orientation – that no matter how incredible the plotting, one’s sense of location is always spot on. Taking the trip are Tom Cruise as the hitman Vincent and Jamie Foxx as his reluctant accomplice Max. They have a busy night ahead of them: dressed in a designer suit, with steel-grey hair and neatly clipped stubble, Vincent is working his way through a list of five protagonists in an upcoming criminal case against one of his clients; quiet, hardworking Max, who’s been dreaming for years of starting an upmarket chauffeur business, must tap into resources he probably never knew he had.
The film opens with Max picking up female fare Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith), and after a playful squabble over the best route from the airport to downtown the two settle into a mutually enjoyable conversation in which they let down their guard. Vincent, glimpsed moving through the airport terminal in the opening shot, materialises downtown, passing Annie on an escalator before hopping into the cab. Already Mann has introduced some of the themes that wend their way through his oeuvre, such as the way people define themselves by their work and a fascination with process, joined here by an examination of the way fate and coincidence intertwine to form a noose that will bind the three characters ever tighter. The final reel may tip into melodrama, but with a performance of murderous charm by Cruise (whose sparring with Foxx early on in the movie has a screwball bite and fizz), a fantastically moody after-hours stop-off in an empty jazz club, and a furious, beautifully choreographed shootout in a crowded nightclub – perhaps the finest action set-piece Mann has staged since the street battle in Heat (1995) – the build-up is superb.
Mann’s previous feature Ali (2001, in which Foxx played the boxer’s motivator Drew Bundini Brown) was weighed down by the moody introspection the director overlaid on the saga of Muhammad Ali’s years of triumph. Which makes the lighter tone of Collateral more of a surprise, as Mann returns to the familiar territory of the existential crime drama explored using new techniques and ideas. Probably the first studio director to embrace digital for its purely aesthetic potential, Mann uses the high-definition technology – in particular its ability to register a rich array of colours and tones in low light and at night – to realise his vision of the city. If the LA of Heat was crisp, almost photorealist in its high-gloss intensity, here the night-time cityscape is rendered with a watercolour delicacy. Collateral’s after-hours timescale may be classic noir, but Mann’s subtle night-vision – the dark sky seems bathed in an urban glow (the pale wash of orange street lights, streaks of white automobile headlights) – softens the genre’s chiaroscuro tendencies.
Mann first experimented with digital cameras in the opening of Ali, capturing clouds moving against a night sky. He subsequently produced a short-lived television show called Robbery Homicide Division that was shot with high-def cameras partly for the sake of economy and partly to enable the filmmakers to work in extremely low light levels. At the time the show seemed an extension of Heat, but it can now be seen, as Mann points out, as a ‘rehearsal’ for Collateral.
Visually Collateral also resembles the spirited first hour of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), another Tom Cruise mood piece. The two films share an abundance of lighting sourced on screen and a palette of hazy blues and greens mixed with smeary oranges, reds and yellows. If Kubrick could prefigure the colours and framing of the still-emerging digital aesthetic, Mann is perhaps the perfect filmmaker to take the technology forward.
Mark Olsen, Sight and Sound, October 2004
Collateral
Director: Michael Mann
©: DreamWorks LLC, Paramount Pictures Corporation
Production Companies: Parkes/MacDonald, Darabont/Fried/Russell
Presented by: DreamWorks Pictures, Paramount Pictures
Distributed by: DreamWorks Distribution LLC
Executive Producers: Frank Darabont, Rob Fried, Chuck Russell, Peter Giuliano
Produced by: Michael Mann, Julie Richardson
Co-producer: Michael Waxman
Associate Producers: Julie Herrin, Bryan H. Carroll, Gusmano Cesaretti
Associate Producer for Tom Cruise: Michael Doven
Head of Feature Production: Michael Grillo
Production Executive: Steven R. Molen
Unit Production Managers: Julie Herrin, Marie Cantin
Production Co-ordinator: Karen Jarnecke
Executive Production Co-ordinator: Jennifer Sanger
Production Controller: Jim Turner
Production Accountant: Jan Dennehy
Location Managers: Janice Polley, Julie Hannum
Post-production Executive: Martin Cohen
Post-production Supervisors: Claire O’Brien, Robyn-Alain Feldman
Post-production Co-ordinator: Chris McCaleb
2nd Unit Directors: Bryan H. Carroll, Gusmano Cesaretti
1st Assistant Director: Michael Waxman
2nd Assistant Director: Carla Bowen
Script Supervisor: Sydney Gilner
Casting: Francine Maisler
Scenario Co-ordinator: Susan Hollander
Written by: Stuart Beattie
Directors of Photography: Dion Beebe, Paul Cameron
Aerial Director of Photography: David B. Nowell
A Camera Operator: Gary Jay
B Camera Operator: Chris Haarhoff
Steadicam Operators: Chris Haarhoff, John Grillo
Digital Imaging Technicians: David Canning, Edward S. Viola, Dominic Bartoloe
Still Photographer: Frank Connor
Visual Effects: Big Red Pixel, Howard Anderson Company, Pacific Title & Art Studio, Pixel Magic
Visual Effects Supervisor: John Sullivan
Special Effects Co-ordinator: Thomas L. Fisher
Video & Computer Graphics Supervisor: Liz Radley
Graphic Artist: Clint Schultz, Jane Ward
Film Editor: Jim Miller, Paul Rubell
Digital On-line Editor: Rob Doolittle
Visual Effects Editor: Ken Blackwell
Production Designer: David Wasco
Art Director: Daniel T. Dorrance
Set Designers: Patrick M. Sullivan Jr, Clint Wallace
Set Decorator: Alexandra Reynolds Wasco
Property Master: Charles Stewart
Costume Designer: Jeffrey Kurland
Costume Supervisor: Corey C. Bronson
Department Head Make-up Artist: Keith Hall
Mr Cruise’s Make-up Artist: Lois Burwell
Department Head Hair Stylist: Roddy Stayton
Titles: Pacific Title
Music: James Newton Howard
Additional Music: Antonio Pinto, Tom Rothrock
Executive Music Supervisors: Todd Homme, Kathy Nelson
Music Supervisor: Vicki Hiatt
Score Recorded/Mixed by: Shawn Murphy
Sound Design/Supervision: Elliott L. Koretz
Production Sound Mixer: Lee Orloff
Re-recording Mixers: Michael Minkler, Myron Nettinga
Sound Editors: Michael Payne, Steven F. Nelson, Kim Secrist, Mike Chock
Sound Effects Editing: SoundStorm
Stunt Co-ordinator: Joel Kramer
Technical Advisers: Michael Gould, Charles Daniel
Research: John Wyatt, David Hollander
Cast
Tom Cruise (Vincent)
Jamie Foxx (Max Durocher)
Jada Pinkett Smith (Annie Farrell)
Mark Ruffalo (Fanning)
Peter Berg (Richard Weidner)
Bruce McGill (Pedrosa)
Irma P. Hall (Ida)
Barry Shabaka Henley (Daniel)
Richard T. Jones (traffic cop 1)
Klea Scott (fed 1)
Bodhi Elfman (young professional man)
Debi Mazar (young professional woman)
Javier Bardem (Felix)
Emilio Rivera (Paco)
Jamie McBride (traffic cop 2)
Ken Ver Cammen, Charlie E. Schmidt Jr (FBI agents)
Michael A. Bentt (Fever bouncer)
Ian Hannin (cell phone partier)
Robert Deamer (sergeant)
David Mersault, Anthony Ochoa (crime scene cops)
Omar Orozco, Edgar Sanchez, Cosme Urquiola (El Rodeo doormen)
Thomas Rosales Jr (Ramone)
Wade Andrew Williams (fed 2)
Paul Adelstein (fed 3)
Jessica Ferrarone (female criminalist)
Troy Blendell (morgue attendant)
Inmo (Peter Lim)
Howard Bachrach (pissed off driver)
Charles Daniel (plainclothes cop)
Corinne Chooey, Jonell Kennedy (waitresses)
Steven Kozlowski, Roger Stoneburner, Rodney Sandberg, George Petrina (white guys)
Donald Dean, Elliott Newman, Trevor Ware, Bobby English, Auggie Cavanagh, Ronald Muldrow (jazz musicians)
Peter McKernan Jr (police helicopter pilot)
Ivor Shier (news helicopter pilot)
Daniel Luján (Rubio 1)
Eddie Diaz (Rubio 2)
Joey Burns, John Convertino, Josh Cruze, Martin Flores, Rick Garcia, Lawrence Goldman, Maurilio Pineda, Daniel Sistos, Jacob Valenzuela, Luis Villegas, Yussi Wenger (El Rodeo band members)
Jason Statham (airport man)
USA 2004©
120 mins
Digital
The screening on Thu 22 May will be introduced by Ian Haydn Smith, writer and curator
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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