A guy gets into a cab. He’s cold, slick, a professional operator. He pays the cabbie to drive him around for the night. Next thing we know, bad guys are getting thrown off balconies and shot point-blank in jazz clubs.
Waiting for the punchline? There isn’t one. Michael Mann’s “Collateral” is a ruthless movie, one where any traces of humor are short-lived and inevitably snuffed out by the constant, lingering threat of execution. With its smeary digital photography, unyielding mood of nocturnal dread, and alluring portraiture of the L.A. underworld after dark, it’s a film that feels as though it could have been made yesterday: while parts of something like “Ferrari” skirt dangerously close to self-aware self-parody in 2024, “Collateral,” along with “Heat,” are the masterworks that helped to cement the Michael Mann playbook as we now know it.
Michael Mann’s characters are rarely afforded the luxury of dreaming, only because their dreams are so often interrupted by catastrophe. They exist in a world where dreams must frequently be put on hold, better to focus on the mission at hand. In this regard, Max – the true protagonist of “Collateral,” played by an achingly human Jamie Foxx – is something of an exception to the filmmaker’s typical rule. Max is an unapologetically blue-collar guy. He clocks hours at a thankless job, one he nevertheless performs with grace. He treats his taxi cab like a temple. He knows all the shortcuts and side streets. He eats cheap lunches on the clock. He’s smarter than most people but doesn’t feel the need to lord his intellect over them. He gets by off tips and the generosity of strangers. Ultimately, Max has very little in his life besides his work.
Yet, Max does have a dream: to own a company of specialized limousines that offer a sort of tropical, island-adjacent vibe so inviting that passengers won’t want to get out of one of his cars before they have to hop on a flight. It’s a silly idea, but it’s also kind of beautiful, and to his credit, Mann never undermines the character’s aspirations: he understands that reaching for something the way Max is reaching for something is a fundamentally spiritual act, and Foxx, who wasn’t yet a mega-star when “Collateral” came out, beautifully underplays Max’s unglamorous command of his hustle in order to focus on the profound sense of compassion lurking beneath his aloof surface.
As with “Heat,” “Collateral” is a study of two diametrically opposed personalities. If Foxx’s Max is earthy and warm, his counterpart – Tom Cruise’s terrifyingly remorseless assassin Vincent – is his polar human antithesis. Vincent has no dreams. He harbors no aspirations, no humanity, no greater sense of the world beyond the laughable, Nic Pizolatto-esque pseudo-wisdom he mutters to Max after their first job together goes awry (“Improvise, adapt to the environment, Darwin, shit happens, I Ching, whatever man, we gotta roll with it” being perhaps the most Michael Mann dialogue that Michael Mann isn’t actually credited with writing; we can thank screenwriter Stuart Beattie for concocting that marvelous batch of word salad). Like many Mann characters, Vincent is focused only on what’s directly in front of him. Whoever gets in the way… well, Vincent has a bulletproof rationale for why their lives don’t mean a thing.
“Collateral” was released in cinemas twenty years ago (the film’s anniversary is coming up in August), during a time when Mann was beginning to make a pivot away from the statelier likes of “Heat” and “The Last Of The Mohicans” and towards a kind of poetic, neo-digital abstraction that went on to define later, more divisive pictures like 2006’s “Miami Vice” and the intensely unconventional John Dillinger biopic “Public Enemies.” Upon release, many didn’t know what to make of “Collateral’s” hyper-naturalistic, almost docurealistic look, which still stands as a more accurate evocation of L.A. at night than almost any other film before or since. Today, “Collateral” still feels lightyears ahead of its time.
There is also the legacy of the film’s performances to consider. Cruise more or less exclusively works in the “Mission: Impossible” and “Top Gun” universes now; this is a throwback to a time when he was a looser, somewhat more experimental actor, even if his signature, single-minded hyper-focus proves to be bone-chilling when presented in this context. It’s Foxx, however, who proved to be the movie’s true breakout. Previously, Foxx had really only shown us his stuff in Mann’s own “Ali,” though the performance he gave a few months later in the glossy biopic “Ray” would propel him to another echelon of superstardom. Without the scruffy, regular-dude honesty of Foxx’s performance as a beleaguered working-class schmuck stuck shepherding a psychopath around greater metropolitan Los Angeles, there’s a chance “Collateral” wouldn’t work at all (I would be remiss for not mentioning Mark Ruffalo’s iconic character intro, which is one of those unforgettable, accented-by-bad-dad-rock Michael Mann montages where it’s hard to tell how funny-on-purpose the director is being).
Like Quentin Tarantino, Mann has some bro-y, obnoxious fans that can make it difficult to enjoy his movies. There is an allergy to nuance when discussing Mann’s work with these individuals, most of whom subscribe to the notion that Mann is an untouchable god, and therefore, impervious to any and all constructive criticism. Still, “Collateral” is a film that affords us a glimpse at why Mann remains one of the best to ever do it: after all these years, it is still an arresting poem of kinesis and death, and one of the defining action pictures of the new millennium.
“Collateral” is currently streaming on Paramount+.