Michael Mann’s Collateral is a bit of a forgotten classic of the thriller genre. It’s scope is large and encompassing and yet at the same time very intimate and personal. On the surface it is about a professional hit man who hires a cabbie to take him around Los Angeles to conduct his “business” over the course of a night. On a deeper level Collateral is a character study of a professional killer, a cab driver and a city at night. There’s a very unique and compelling nighttime vibe to the movie, presenting the audience with the world of a city that is alive while they are at home in bed.
Jamie Foxx plays Max, an every man cab driver, who has aspirations of starting his own limousine business, which he continues to talk about, but has never actually acted upon. He is very professional and personable, even going so far as to argue routes with his passengers in order to save them cab fair. Max is a very sympathetic character, if you cannot relate to Max’s situation personally, you know someone like him. His appearance is very lived in, a hoodie, t shirt, glasses, and really speaks to Max’s characterization as an everyman. Jamie Foxx inhabits the character this character to such an extent that you forget you are watching Jamie Foxx. This is so key for us as the audience and our ability to really empathize and identify with Max as it becomes clear that he is essentially a hostage to a professional killer. Max’s status as an everyman gives the character very real stakes when he is facing down the barrel of the gun of a professional killer. It also makes his development as a character all the more powerful when he is finally able to fight back and stand up to Vincent, and protect not only himself, but his love interest in the movie, his fare from earlier in the evening, Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith).
Tom Cruise plays the sociopath professional killer who hires and hijacks Max’s cab over the course of a night. Cruise is electric in a rare turn as the villain in the film. Vincent is personable too, on the surface. The more time we spend with him though, we realize this is a learned behaviour to disguise his true nature as a sociopath. He is a professional who is damned good at his job, and his job is to kill people his clients don’t want around anymore. Vincent is very disconnected and dispassionate about the murders he commits throughout the course of the movie, he has no empathy for his victims or anyone for that matter, which of course is the very definition of a sociopath. He is however, almost paradoxically, very perceptive and penetrating in reading the people he comes into contact with. He is able to identify very quickly that Max is reluctant to carry out his business plan and making excuses not to carry it out. He is able to perceive these flaws, but he cannot identify or empathize with them. Vincent’s perceptive nature makes him all the more menacing to Max and the audience through the course of the movie.
The third character in the movie is not a person, but a city. Collateral brings the city of Los Angeles to life in a way no other movie has before or since. This is the first movie to really bring a city to life throughout the course of a night. A city is a completely different beast in the middle of the night than the one any normal person would recognize during the day. Michael Mann used digital cameras to film Collateral which closer approximates the lighting of a city that is perceived by the human eye. The city is lit much the way it would be if you were there yourself, with the clouds over Los Angeles refracting the lights of the city back onto itself. We as the audience traverse this strange nighttime city with Max and Vincent, within the confines of Max’s cab, as the lights and the scenery of Los Angeles pass by just outside. The scope of the massive bustling city at night is in stark contrast to the intimate, claustrophobic setting of the cab we are riding around in. There is an eerie vibe to a near deserted city at night that really lends itself to the building of tension and suspense within the confines of Max’s cab.
Collateral is a very unique thriller that allows the audience to ride around Los Angeles in a cab through the course of a night with Max the cab driver and Vincent the professional killer. Our empathy and connection to Max as a sort of every man drives all of the tension within the movie as we also feel the menacing presence of Vincent, a professional killer, in the back seat. The more time we spend with these characters, the more is slowly revealed about their respective natures. All of this taking place against the backdrop of a very real and deserted Los Angeles in the middle of the night, just outside the windows of the cab. The tension and suspense that build from these dynamics make Collateral an unmistakable classic thriller of the neo noir genre.