Lost in the star
Tom Cruise gets Mann-handled in Collateral.

By Edward E. Crouse

A BULLET- riddled long night of the soul around a grim, landmark-free Los Angeles, Collateral is a beautiful, lowercase black hole. At once taut and scattered, talky and eye-filling, loose and calculated, pulpy and poetic, pared down and ingeniously cluttered, the movie returns Michael Mann to a smaller ambient scale than his recent Oscar jabs, Ali and The Insider. Shot on high-definition video and tweaked in postproduction to a fine set of flurried neonized particles, Mann's ever impeccable palette elegantly renders the mad clashes of airports, freeways, skyscrapers, side streets, and – best of all – a taxiscape. The result just might be the finest H.D. movie out of Hollywood.

And yet Hollywood, per se, is beside the point. Despite having more thrillerish action per square inch than most disassociative summer behemoths, Collateral is a road movie always hot to return to the confines of the "cleanest cab in Los Angeles," driven by Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx), for a face-off between Max and Vincent (a frosted Tom Cruise). A "superassassin" – and a passenger for most of the movie – Vincent has an assignment, one that's perpetually being consulted and laid out on a flash card in his Palm Pilot: his contract is to take down five federal witnesses he's never met before. Max, a professional in his own right, able to impressively crunch multi-borough geography, is ruthlessly trapped into being Vincent's deadly charioteer, while the latter makes his rounds. Meanwhile both the Los Angeles Police Department (embodied by a homied-out Mark Ruffalo) and the feds are late in picking up the trail, using logic to land in exactly the right place a few seconds too late. The net result is an existential study of two men, an anti-buddy picture if you like, one that frustrates and devours a police procedural and forestalls a meet-cute romantic story between Max and prosecutor Annie (Jada Pinkett-Smith).

"Sprawled out, disconnected – you know. That's me." Semiblurred through thick taxicab Plexiglas, an unshaven salt cake of James Brolin hair pontificates from the back seat of Max's cab. Is that really Cruise talking? The logical next face of a male-Mann grotesquerie – one that would inevitably star John Voight's elfin Howard Cosell (Ali) and Christopher Plummer's wax statue Mike Wallace and Russell Crowe's wart-sporting ogre (both from The Insider) – Cruise it is, and he brings his own sense of outsize scale and self-laceration. Is this the M:I-2 Cruise, so wheezingly, tightly shot that you could scrape the tartar off his front teeth? Or an extension of the bedroom moments in Eyes Wide Shut, when he resembles a hunchback while his real-life wife mocks his hollow certainties? After so many years of out-of-depth boyishness, Cruise has morphed into a rumple-prone totem, suavity made to be damaged.

Or has Mann sprawled? So much in Collateral describes Mann's own superformal transgenre approach that the movie is nigh-confessional: Javier Bardem's cameo monologue about believing in Humpty-Dumpty (i.e., ripping it all up and then trying to put it together again), Cruise's Zen spiel about method ("Improvise. Adapt. Shit happens."), and a jazzman's recollection of the night he blew with Miles ("That night was the moment of my conception"). Though the soundtrack is peppered with soul and jazz, the payoff songs seem to prove that Mann has never met a turgid, wack-ass crashing guitar solo he didn't like.

Mann is one of the few directors whose X rays of male anxieties don't ever veer into Friedkin-like homoeroticism. Vincent is ultimately a machine who enables Max to chase the dreams he's put on hold driving a cab for 12 years. The moment when Vincent and Max pause to take in a cruising coyote, the blood vessels of its eyes green from the headlights, has an almost unbearable weight, one hinted at by all the anthill helicopter views and fun-house mirror glints of the landscapes Mann's been piling on all along. The alienation is a permanent condition, even if occasionally a dare arises to take us out of it all. One is reminded of the final shot of Mann's first masterwork, Manhunter – the antihero plopped into the beige, pink, and turquoise frieze of a beach scene, still ill at ease – a sign-off that has ended up being a permanent mark on Mann's career as a "tight shooter" of angst and frustration. Foxx, who reaches an unexpected peak as the not-so-hapless driver here, playing his role as a slow-fast, sentimental absurdist-comedic heart attack, eventually absorbs Vincent's way of thinking: "Shit happens. Gotta roll with it. Adapt. Darwin. I-Ching." Or as one doomed character says, quoting Miles, "Cool."

'Collateral' opens Fri/6 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock for show times.