Collateral

Some movies belong to the night, they happen in the night, and they are just this enveloping darkness where a lot of things are possible, which are not possible otherwise, and "Collateral" is an extreme example in that sense because it happens during one night in January 2004.

Max (Jamie Fox) is a middle age humble cab driver in Los Angeles, he is a regular guy, with hopes and dreams, which will probably never happen, one day he picks a client, a beautiful district attorney (Jada Pinkett) and gets along well with her, not knowing that this cab ride will change his life.

Somehow he crosses paths with a ruthless killer Vincent (Tom Cruise) who is in town for some "cleaning jobs" and who convinces him to be his driver, of course a lot happens, because max has to deal with his fears, his lack of initiative, his obsessive mother, and of course learns a lot in the contact of somebody as Vincent, who is as methodical as a killing machine, all that happening in the awesomely filmed LA night.

First of all, let me say this, I'm a big fan of Micheal Mann and i don't hide it, this man made "Heat" another big LA film, and if you can have Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro on screen, then you are our hero, and I admire his pioneering work in the use of big digital cameras, which
yield magnificent results especially during night scenes, and this movie is a night movie by excellence, and it's a movie so faithful to that esoteric spirit of Midnight to 3AM

Tom Cruise, as much as you can blame him for carrying his big sientologist smile on screens for two decades, is as brilliant as he was in "Magnolia", his interpretation and his physical changes are impressive, he is exactly the night fox of this movie, agile, predator, and efficient, as you would expect them, and within the tiny space in the cab, a really psychological duel faces him to Max, duel of motives, duel of Live in the moment versus carefully planned, and you see Max
toughening during the movie to the point he impresses even himself.

All the classical themes of the night are present too, the loneliness, the Jazz, the nightclubs,the silcnce, the meditation, and whatever the curtains of night fall one, and the movie ends in a way mirroring it's beginning, the terrible oneliness of a town of fifty millions people with all that abundance in everything, except maybe human warmth.

As far as I am concerned this movie is part of an LA trilogy, started with Heat, and i hope that Micheal Mann will close it with a worthy third episode, because some movies are characters, and because catching the spirit of a city is as difficult as describing an intense multilevel feeling, but this is a movie that has a finger on the pulse of what is probably the most fascinating city in pop culture, and that's why it would be almost a sin to miss it.

Released: 2004, Origin: US