Collateral
Degree of Difficulty
The best way to approach Collateral is like golf. The point of golf — other than drinking beer, driving the cart, and cursing at a little white ball — is to complete your assigned task in as few strokes as possible. This is what Tom Cruise is trying to do here. He is a contract killer, and he’s very good at what he does, and is trying to make challenges for himself in his job. Hence what he’s trying to do in this movie — kill five people with the least amount of muss and fuss possible, spread out through Los Angeles, without drawing any attention to himself, and catching the red-eye out of town. You’re not supposed to like him (making him almost unique in the Cruise pantheon), but you have to respect his commitment to his work.
Of course, the thing with golf is that it’s improvisational; you never know quite where that little ball is going to go. (This is, just as an aside, what makes Tiger Woods so watchable; he’s terribly erratic at times, but he can make the impossible shot out of the rough or the bunker to save himself.) So with the hired-killer business; you have to improvise, adapt, overcome, and save yourself when things go wrong. And if this involves killing people outside the scope of who you were meant to kill — collateral damage, hence the title — then you have to do that.
Cruise, of course, gets things wrong from the get-go. He picks a random cab to drive him around on his errands. The cabbie is Jamie Foxx, who is (understandably) reluctant to go along with the plan, despite a $600 bonus. Foxx is smart (a little slow on the uptake at times, but smart) and resourceful, and he learns how to be brave along the way. He’s also quiet, which is a good thing — imagine how Chris Tucker would have played this part. (Maybe you had better not, though.)
Things get worse from there. Cruise shoots his first victim, propelling him out of a fourth-floor window, banging up Foxx’s taxi and forcing them to stuff the corpse in the trunk. All sorts of other unplanned detours and side trips result from this, none of them worth explicating here (and thereby ruining things for anyone who really wants to watch this). The murders get progressively more and more difficult, and this leads to all sorts of fun, messy action chases and whatnot.
But it’s all an exercise. There’s nothing real in Collateral. It’s all about surfaces and reflections, looking good, being cool, thinking your way out of tight situations. There’s just Tom Cruise, trying to kill the people he needs to kill before his plane leaves, and coping with the problems as the degree of difficulty for each kill gets harder.
I suppose there’s more to say about Collateral, but what good would it do? Here’s a movie we’ve all seen before — as a Miami Vice episode if nothing else — with attractive actors like Cruise and Foxx, and Jada Pinkett Smith, too. It won’t shock you or scare you or engage you at any level, and if that’s what you want at 9:00 on a Thursday night watching HBO in your sweatpants, you’ll get that and not much more. And that’ll be all you deserve.
But with the level of talent involved, you’d expect that Collateral would be — well, not a hole-in-one, but a fifty-foot eagle putt. Instead, it’s more of a double bogey with a three-putt on a par-five hole — overly long, not incredibly dramatic or interesting, and a huge disappointment.