Collateral (2004)

Director: Michael Mann

Producer: Michael Mann, Julie Richardson

Writer: Stuart Beattie

Actors: Tom Cruise; Jamie Foxx; Jada Pinckett Smith; Mark Ruffalo

Music: James Newton Howard

Cinematography: Dion Beebe; Paul Cameron

Rated: R

Running time: 120 mins.

  L.A. noir--- the city at night.

     Whenever I come into Los Angeles at night, especially after being away for a while, the first thing I notice are the millions of lights, a beaming, blinking blanket of luminescence spread out like stars in an upside down sky. It’s a marvelous and breathtaking sight; it always thrills me--- the utter beauty of it. L.A. is a city often touted for its sunshine and mild clime, but it’s the cool darkness of an L.A. night that casts a spell and possesses a beauty not found elsewhere --but a dangerous dark beauty. Things happen at night.

       Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004) brings this home in spades. For me, it’s the quintessential L.A. at night movie. The Los Angeles Times writers and editors have voted it the 9th best movie set in L.A. in the last 25 years. Mann captures the exquisiteness of PM Los Angeles: the clubs, bars, and trendy night spots, along with the silhouetted night skyline--- and, yes, those lights, those mesmerizing lights. But he also presents the darkness behind the lights: the drugs, the stakeouts, the empty streets, the violence, and the blood stained alley.

        Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx) drives a cab. He works at night driving people who are usually in a hurry and so wrapped up in their own lives that Max goes mostly unnoticed and ignored. One night in January he picks up a federal prosecutor at LAX and takes her to her office downtown. They hit it off, and she tells him she’s working on an important case and is a little uneasy about the outcome. She also takes a liking to Max and he to her. She gives him her card. 

         Not long after that Max picks up a man who calls himself Vincent (Tom Cruise) claiming to be in town to clinch a real estate deal. He offers to pay Max $600 to drive him to five locations and wait while he gets the signatures he needs. Max agrees, and what follows is one rough ride. After the first stop and a corpse comes flying out an apartment window onto his cab, Max finds out that Vincent is an out-of-town hit man hired by a drug boss to eliminate five witnesses in a case against him. From then on Max belongs to Vincent for the rest of the of the night and is forced to accompany him on his murder spree. 

            In the course of their ride together the men talk and a strange bonding develops between them.  Max is a good man, an Angeleno who loves his city and cares about  the people who live in it. Vincent, the assassin and the outsider, has a low opinion of L. A.; murder is his business and Los Angeles with its anonymity and apparently self-absorbed populace is a perfect place to operate.

           Finally, with all but one of Vincent’s targets having been finished off, and with the police and the F.B.I. in pursuit, Max learns that Annie (Jada Pinckett Smith), the prosecutor he met earlier that night, is to be Vincent’s last victim. He purposely wrecks the cab, but Vincent runs off to  finish his mission. When a cop arrives, Max steals his gun and races to warn Annie, who is working late at her office. All three come together in Annie’s office building, and a  chase ensues in which Vincent pursues Max and Annie into the Seventh Street Metro station where they jump into a Blue Line train headed for Long Beach. It ends with Vincent shot by Max and dying in the empty Metro train, and Max and Annie exiting into the dawn of a new day.

               As is evident from his previous work, e.g. Miami Vice, Thief, and Heat, Michael Mann loves the city. Cities play a big part in his most visceral movies. And using L.A., as he did in Heat, as backdrop for this story was not just a matter of convenience or budget.  He definitely had a statement to make. Right from the very first scene and continuing through the film Mann hits on something important that makes this town both typical and at the same time different from other cities of its size and stature. Vincent’s murderous mission through night-time Los Angeles takes him and Max to a classic jazz club in Leimert Park, a high-end apartment house in Hollywood, a Latino night club in Pico Rivera (the song Destino de Abril stays with you long after you’ve heard it), and a Korean dance club on Sixth Street. They also stop at a hospital for a bit of comic relief. From this we get a wide view of the multiculturalism and vastness of the city. Anglos, Latinos, Blacks, and Asians all sharing the same urban environment. Besides the murders and mayhem, we also see dedicated police officers and F.B.I. agents who risk and on occasion lose their lives in the course of their job; a jazz club owner/musician who only wants to be allowed to relive past glories but pays the ultimate price for a past association; a lonely elderly woman in a hospital craving attention--- plus a gas station attendant; a morgue medic, and a scavenger coyote crossing a deserted street--- all Angelenos trying to make it through the night. 

                  Mann’s message here is that this is a city that’s not perfect (what city is?), yet it’s a place that continues to change and reinvent itself but has never ceased to lose its potential and excite the imagination--- as long as those lights keep shining.