Collateral

Directed by Michael Mann, Collateral follows Los Angeles taxi driver Max (Jamie Foxx) as he picks up Tom Cruise’s mysterious Vincent and subsequently finds himself tagging along on his flashy fare’s murderous escapades over the course of one very long night. It’s a fairly irresistible premise that’s employed to distressingly erratic effect by Mann, as the filmmaker, working from a screenplay by Stuart Beattie, delivers a meandering thriller that’s only sporadically as engrossing and captivating as one might’ve expected – with the aggressively hit-and-miss midsection compounded by a palpably overlong running time and preponderance of padded-out sequences. And although Foxx and especially Cruise are admittedly quite electric in their respective roles, Collateral‘s hands-off atmosphere is perpetuated by Mann’s use of substandard digital cinematography – as there is, in the end, never a point at which the shockingly low-rent visuals become anything less than a total distraction. The thoroughly tense climax does, at least, ensure that the whole thing concludes on a appreciatively positive note, which ultimately cements Collateral‘s place as a wildly uneven endeavor from a notoriously inconsistent director.

**1/2 out of ****