Collateral

It starts out promisingly enough, and for a while it's a solid, if unremarkable, thriller. Jamie Fox plays a likeable, professional cabbie that's hired for the whole night to take Tom Cruise (a hired killer) to the sites of five hits. When the Cab driver discovers what his fare is up to the standard cat and mouse games ensue, as the killer insists on using him as his personal chauffeur for the night.
While that goes on, there’s some uneasy character building going on between the two, and the movie also follows the police (and later, federal) investigation into the night’s killings.

And, as I said before, it works for a while. But keeping it up proves to be too much of a hassle. Even a workmanlike thriller like this one needs good craftsmanship, and it seems that everyone involved decided to wrap it up as soon as possible and go to the pub. Michael Mann has done some extremely good stuff in the past (Heat, The Insider, The Thief), but here he lazily follows a lousy script to increasing depths. The problems really start to show at a showdown in a discotheque, and when the final twist is revealed… oh what the hell, you can see this one coming a mile away, and besides, it’s in the trailer- it turns out that the cabdriver’s potential love interest (who he had a meet-cute with just that very night) is the final victim in the hit list. Fucking hell, what do they tell whichever fuck-wit that comes up with this shit? Insult the intelligence of the viewers as much as possible? Let’s see what’s the stupidest thing we can come up with and watch them gobble it up?
By the time Tom Cruise is unerringly tracking his prey in a subway complex (one assumes he’s using his scientologist superpowers to do it, why not?), the only thing that can conceivably keep you watching is morbidity. But then again, this movie scored 7.7 on IMDB… where’s my shotgun?