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Collateral Subhash K Jha

Movie Collateral Director Michael Mann Cast Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett-Smith

By Subhash K Jha

Rating: ** Didn’t Michael Mann make the moving and mirthful The Insider about the tobacco-industry squealer played by Russel Crowe? Well, Collateral too is moving and mirthful. Considering it's the story of a taxidriver, the narrative has got to be ‘moving’. This film doesn’t move, it cruises. With Cruise taking the backseat to navigate the narrative through a darkly lit thriller. As for mirthful, if you find the idea of a contract killer bumping off people and hurling them down from highrises on the cabbie’s vehicle funny, you are welcome to visit Michael Mann’s curious but strangely sterile thriller-on-wheels. There are seeds of an explosive cat-and-mouse drama in Collateral.Consider this.An out-of-work actor has been moonlighting as a cabbie for 12 years. So what happens when we catch him one humid night? Certainly not what happened to Robert de Niro in Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver! Unlike De Niro and Scorcese, the life of the cab driver in Michael Mann’s drama lacks the searching probing existential resonance. Collateral is a ramrod-straight thriller with a lot of dialogues and situations appearing stilted and stagey. The worst fate that could meet a thriller is predictability. Regrettably Collateral is guilty of devising scenes and action that any aficionado of crime thrillers can predict with his eyes closed. Jamie Foxx as the cabbie and Tom Cruise as his unlikely passenger who just happens to be an assassin, play off against each other without much surprise or chemical crackle. It's all about saying the politically cool lines in the coolest way possible. They both manage to suffuse sufficient feeling into their lines to make their tempestuous togetherness exciting to watch. Beyond a point the assassins' night-out begins to get tiresomely subverted. Coz Cruise is cool as the cruising killer, the plot tends to project his character(Vincent,if you must know)more glamorously than required. If the same role had been played by a trueblue character actor like Robert Duvall, Jon Voight or Ben Kingsley the killer would have been cold rather than cool. Cruise brings a sinuous glamour into his part. Every time he strikes down one of his victims, which includes a jazz musician performing in an elobarately staged musical performance that culminates in the kind of mayhem that’s supposed to bring a shudder to the audiences’ spine. Foxx’s squeamish disapproval seems more like a statement on cowardice than a repudiation of glamour. And when Foxx goes into a crowded debauched nightclub posing as Vincent(how how how? Cabbie black, killer white, cabbie Foxx, killer Cruise?!),the dialogues and acting hit rock-bottom. Clearly there’s a serious ethical disorder in the plot caused by Tom Cruise’s grey star-turn. It’s the brilliant climax staged in a dark apartment which saves the dreadful film from taking a drubbing. But the screenplay depends on too many wild coincidences to get there. The pushy way Foxx’s romantic lead (played by Mrs Will Smith, Jada Pinkett-Smith) is teased into the plot as both a love signal and a climactic cop-out is clever only to those who believe formulistic filmmaking is all about positioning the characters in a combustion of improbable conflicts. Strangely, while director Mann keeps the tone of the narration under-stated his plot seems to heave and belch under the most bombastic circumstances, all of them remarkable more for what they try to make of formulistic episodes, rather than portraying the desperate characters in any tenable situation. Though not an unwatchable thriller—the long catch-me-if-can climax takes care of that—Collateral is disappointing in almost every detail. The hired-killer’s wry selfworth is too ‘sexy’ to be fearsome. And the protagonist is too wimpish to be appealing. The smoky music score by James Newton Howard adds nothing to stop the feeling that we’re being manipulated into getting caught up in a tension that has no logistic value. That the film succeeds in its manoeuvres has entirely to do with our weakness for morality tales where the villain is so magnetic he makes mayhem look like a fashion statement.