Michael Mann’s Collateral strands a Los Angeles cab driver with a hitman in his back seat and keeps him trapped in the cab for most of the night. Tom Cruise plays Vincent, a contract killer in the city for one night. Jamie Foxx plays Max Durocher, the driver who takes the fare. The film runs 120 minutes and was released in 2004.
Trailer, via Amblin Entertainment.
A $600 Fare and a Corpse on the Hood
The premise is a trap that closes slowly. Vincent tells Max he is in Los Angeles for one night to complete a real estate deal and hires him to drive to a series of meetings. Money is the hook. Max is saving his earnings to start his own limousine business, so a long fare at a high rate is exactly what he wants.
Then a body falls onto the car.
Vincent drops the pretense and forces Max to put the corpse in the trunk and keep driving. From that point the film is a two-hander locked inside a vehicle, with the city moving past the windows and Max’s options shrinking at every stop.
Mann directed and produced Collateral. Stuart Beattie wrote it. The supporting cast includes Jada Pinkett Smith as federal prosecutor Annie Farrell, Mark Ruffalo as LAPD Detective Ray Fanning, Peter Berg as Richard Weidner, Javier Bardem as Felix Reyes-Torrena, and Bruce McGill as Frank Pedrosa.
Vincent’s Briefcase and the Men Who Want It
The second stop is where Collateral shows what it is made of. Vincent restrains Max’s hands to the steering wheel and leaves the car. Max tries the horn to signal for help. Four men come around to rob him and take Vincent’s briefcase.
Vincent returns and shoots two of them dead. He takes the briefcase back. The scene does two jobs at once: it proves Vincent is not merely a man with a gun and a schedule, and it proves that Max cannot count on anyone else in the city to save him. The men who answer the horn are robbers, not rescuers.
Detective Fanning arrives at the site of the first kill and learns the victim was a police informant. That detail matters because it turns Vincent’s night from a private arrangement into something the LAPD will chase. Fanning is a thread of institutional pressure in the film, and Ruffalo plays him as a man working a case he does not yet understand.
A Jazz Club, Miles Davis, and Daniel Baker
The third target is Daniel Baker, played by Barry Shabaka Henley. Vincent orders Max to a jazz club to find him. Daniel is set to testify against Vincent’s client, which is why he is on the list.
Max pleads with Vincent to let Daniel go. Vincent says he will, on one condition: Daniel has to answer a single question about Miles Davis. Daniel gives an answer that sounds correct. Vincent is not satisfied with it, and shoots him in the head.
That is the coldest beat in the film and the most revealing. The scene suggests Vincent never intended to let Daniel go. He offered him a test with a hidden answer, and the killing follows from that judgment call rather than from rage. The scene also does something the rest of Collateral only gestures at: it makes Vincent a man with opinions, standards and a private sense of what is genuine. He is not indifferent. He is worse than indifferent. He is a critic with a gun.
The Hospital, Ida, and the Lie Max Tells
Vincent learns that Max visits the hospital every night to see his mother. He insists Max keep the appointment. At the hospital, Ida Durocher, played by Irma P. Hall, tells Vincent proudly that Max has his own limousine company.
That is a lie Max has been telling her, and the gap between the life he describes and the one he lives is the film’s sharpest emotional cut. Vincent now knows the man driving him has been living a smaller life than the one he describes. Max is overwhelmed. He steals Vincent’s briefcase, which holds prep information on the targets, and runs, eventually hurling it onto a freeway.
The briefcase is the film’s best device. It turns Vincent’s professionalism into evidence, and it gives Max something to carry besides fear. The night shifts from a hostage situation toward something closer to an investigation.
Where Michael Mann’s Camera Changes the Rules
Collateral was the first feature film shot with a Viper FilmStream High-Definition Camera, and it shows. Filming took place primarily throughout Los Angeles. The result is a city that looks like itself at night rather than like a movie set pretending to be a city at night.
James Newton Howard composed the score, with additional songs from Audioslave and Paul Oakenfold. The music sits low in the mix. Much of the tension in Collateral comes from the frame and the two men in it.
The film’s production history is worth knowing. Beattie conceived the idea while taking a taxi home from Sydney Airport and shared it with producer Julie Richardson, who showed it to director Frank Darabont. It was pitched to HBO and declined. DreamWorks Pictures bought it, and it sat without development for three years. Before Mann, Cruise and Foxx joined, Mimi Leder, Janusz Kamiński and Fernando Meirelles were each considered to direct, and Russell Crowe and Adam Sandler were in talks to play Vincent and Max.
The Two Men in the Cab
| Max Durocher | Vincent | |
|---|---|---|
| Played by | Jamie Foxx | Tom Cruise |
| Job | Los Angeles cab driver | Contract killer |
| Goal | Save earnings, start a limousine business | Complete a night of killings |
| Relationship to the city | Lives in it, drives it nightly | Passing through for one night |
| The lie | Tells his mother he owns a limousine company | Tells Max he is in town for a real estate deal |
The table is the film in miniature. Both men are lying about what they are. Only one of them, as the film frames it, is lying to be loved.
What Collateral Gets Right, and What It Leaves on the Table
Here is the order of what actually works, from strongest to weakest.
- The jazz club scene with Daniel Baker. Vincent’s killing comes out of a judgment call, not rage, and it defines him.
- The hospital visit. Ida’s pride in a business that does not exist is the film’s one moment of real emotional damage.
- The opening fare with Annie Farrell, who gives Max her business card and sets up the world he wants to belong to.
- The second stop, where four robbers take the briefcase. It is the most conventional beat in the film and exists mainly to show what Vincent can do.
- The long middle stretch, where the pattern of drive, wait, kill, drive starts to feel like a list.
The best decision Mann makes is to keep the camera close and the geography clear. Max’s cab is a container, and every stop is a small release of pressure that Vincent immediately closes again. Cruise is genuinely unsettling because he plays Vincent as competent rather than theatrical. The weaker stretch is the middle, where the film has to work harder to keep its stops from feeling mechanical.
The ending, with Max hurling the briefcase onto a freeway, is where the film finally gives its driver something to do besides survive. That is the right instinct. It arrives late.
Collateral reads as a mid-tier entry in Mann’s filmography rather than a peak. It is a tighter, smaller film than the crime epics he is known for, and it benefits from that discipline even when it runs out of ideas about what to do with its own premise. The pairing of Cruise and Foxx is the reason to watch it, and the reason it holds up. Two actors carrying very different weights, locked in a car, working out which one of them is telling the truth.
The published critical score is 7.1/10, and that is the right number. Collateral is a strong, controlled thriller with one great scene and a handful of good ones, and a premise that does most of the work before the second act begins. It is worth the fare.
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