Collateral (film)

Collateral
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Michael Mann
Produced by	Michael Mann Julie Richardson
Written by	Stuart Beattie
Starring	Tom Cruise Jamie Foxx Jada Pinkett Smith Mark Ruffalo Peter Berg Bruce McGill
Music by	James Newton Howard
Cinematography	Dion Beebe Paul Cameron
Edited by	Jim Miller Paul Rubell
Production companies	Parkes/MacDonald Productions Edge City
Distributed by	DreamWorks Pictures (North America) Paramount Pictures (International)
Release dates	August 6, 2004 (2004-08-06)
Running time	120 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$65 million
Box office	$217.8 million[1]

Collateral is a 2004 American neo-noir crime thriller directed by Michael Mann and written by Stuart Beattie. It stars Tom Cruise cast against type as a contract killer and Jamie Foxx as a taxi driver who finds himself his hostage during an evening of the hitman's work. The film also features Jada Pinkett Smith and Mark Ruffalo.

Foxx and Cruise's performances were widely praised, with Foxx being nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The film's editors, Jim Miller and Paul Rubell, were also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing.

Plot

Max Durocher, a meticulous Los Angeles cab driver (Jamie Foxx) is working to earn enough to start his own limousine business. One of the evening's fares is U.S. Justice Department prosecutor Annie Farrell (Jada Pinkett Smith). On the drive to her office, they strike up a conversation and Annie gives Max her business card.

Max's next fare is Vincent (Tom Cruise) who exits the building just after Annie entered. Impressed by Max's skill at navigating the streets of LA, Vincent offers Max $600 to drive him for the entire night, against regulations. Max reluctantly agrees, as the money is too good to pass up. As Max waits at the first stop, a man falls onto his car. Vincent reveals himself as a hitman, and the dead man, drug dealer Ramón Ayala, is the first of five targets for the night. He forces Max to hide the body in the trunk and continue driving.

At the second stop, Vincent ties Max to the steering wheel. Max sounds his horn and flashes his lights, attracting the attention of a group of young men. He asks them for help, but instead two of them take his wallet and Vincent's briefcase. Vincent returns and kills the two, much to Max's horror. At a gas station, Vincent tells Max they are ahead of schedule and offers to buy him a drink at a jazz club he likes. Vincent admires the trumpet player on the stage, Daniel (Barry Shabaka Henley), and after his set, invites him over for a drink. Vincent and Max listens with enthusiasm as Daniel talks about his experience with famous jazz musician Miles Davis, but Daniel turns out to be Vincent's third mark and, after the club closes, Vincent kills him in front of Max. Max tells Vincent that he wants out, but Vincent threatens to kill him if he refuses to obey.

Max's boss, who constantly calls Max over the radio regarding his whereabouts, informs Max that his mother Ida (Irma P. Hall) is trying to reach him. Learning of Max's nightly visits to his hospitalized mother, Vincent insists Max does not break his routine and visits her. At the hospital, Max grabs Vincent's briefcase containing files on his targets, runs on a pedestrian bridge and tosses the briefcase onto the freeway. Vincent forces Max to meet drug lord Felix Reyes-Torrena (Javier Bardem) to obtain information on his last two marks, threatening to murder Ida otherwise. Posing as Vincent, Max meets with Felix and successfully acquires the information on a USB flash drive. Vincent heads to the next target, Korean gangster Peter Lim, who is at a nightclub.

Meanwhile, LAPD Detective Ray Fanning (Mark Ruffalo) uncovers the connection between the three victims and reports his finding to FBI Special Agent Frank Pedrosa (Bruce McGill). Frank identifies the victims as witnesses in a federal grand jury indicting Felix for the following day, and thus are target for assassination. Pedrosa assembles a force to secure Lim. At the nightclub, they run into Vincent, who is being followed by Felix's men. Vincent manages to kill all of Felix's hitmen, Lim's bodyguards and Lim himself, then leaves the club. Fanning rescues Max and smuggles him outside, but is killed by Vincent, who beckons Max back into the cab.

Following their getaway, the two start trading personal insults and criticisms. Vincent mocks Max for his lack of ambition, while Max berates Vincent for his disregard for human life. This escalates into an argument that prompts Max into deliberately crashing the cab, intending to stop Vincent's rampage. However, both men survive and Vincent escapes. A police officer arrives at the crash to help, but then notices Ayala's corpse in the trunk and arrests Max. He initially surrenders, but while the officer handcuffs him, he sees Vincent's laptop open in the cab, and learns that Annie is the final target. He overpowers the policeman and takes Vincent's gun and heads to Annie's office.

Max calls Annie while she is in the law library to warn her of Vincent's impending hit on her. At first, Annie accuses him of playing a practical joke on her, but she is shocked when he reveals that he knows about Felix and the other witnesses to the case she is going to prosecute the next day. Vincent breaks into her office two floors below the library. Max sees Vincent in the window and beckons Annie to call 911, just as his cell phone battery dies. He rushes into the building, and using the gun he retrieved, shoots his way through the glass doors to the elevator cage. Meanwhile, Annie calls 911, but Vincent uses a fire axe to cut the power to the floor, and the call is lost.

A tense hunt ensues as Annie is trapped in the library in the dark. Vincent finally finds her and holds her at gunpoint, but Max saves her just in time by wounding Vincent, and the two escape on foot. Still pursued by Vincent, Max and Annie board a metro rail train, but Vincent boards the train as well. Left with no other option, Max makes his last stand and engages in a shootout with Vincent. Vincent reaches into his magazine pouch to reload, but discovers that he is out of ammunition, and that he is fatally wounded. Exhausted, he slumps into a seat and dies, as he refers to an anecdote about a man who died unnoticed on a train. Max and Annie get off at the next station, in the dawn of a new day.

Cast

Production

When he was 17 years old, Australian writer Stuart Beattie took a cab home from Sydney airport, and had the idea of a homicidal maniac sitting in the back of a cab with the driver nonchalantly conversing with him, trusting his passenger implicitly. Beattie drafted his idea into a two-page treatment entitled "The Last Domino," then later began writing the screenplay. The original story centered around an African-American female cop who witnesses a hit, and the romance between the cab driver and his then librarian girlfriend. The film has limited resemblance to the original treatment.

Beattie was waiting tables when he ran into friend Julie Richardson, whom he had met on a UCLA Screenwriting Extension course. Richardson had become a producer, and was searching for projects for Edge City, Frank Darabont, Rob Fried and Chuck Russell's company created to make low budget genre movies for HBO. Beattie later pitched her his idea of "The Last Domino." Richardson pitched the idea to Frank Darabont, who brought the team in for a meeting, including Beattie, and set up the project under Edge City. After two drafts, HBO passed on the project. At a general meeting at DreamWorks, with executive Marc Haimes, Beattie mentioned the script. Marc Haimes immediately contacted Richardson, read the script overnight, and DreamWorks put in an offer the following day.

Collateral sat on DreamWorks' development books for three years. Mimi Leder was initially attached to direct, it then passed on to Janusz Kamiński. It wasn't until Russell Crowe became interested in playing Vincent that the project started generating any heat. Crowe brought Michael Mann on board, but the constant delays meant that Crowe left the project. Mann immediately went to Tom Cruise with the idea of him playing the hitman and Adam Sandler as the cab driver. Sandler later dropped out (due to his work on comedy) and was replaced by Jamie Foxx.

Beattie wanted the studio to cast Robert De Niro as Max (once again making him a taxi driver, though the exact opposite of Travis Bickle). However, the studio refused, insisting they wanted a younger actor in the role.

Mann chose to use the Viper FilmStream High-Definition Camera to film many of Collateral's scenes, the first such use in a major motion picture. There are many scenes in the film where the use of a digital camera is evident, in particular, scenes where the Los Angeles skyline or landscape is visible in the background. One event of note was the filming of the coyotes running across the road; the low-light capability allowed Mann to spontaneously film the animals that just happened to pass, without having to set up lighting for the shot. Mann had previously used the format for portions of Ali and for his CBS drama Robbery Homicide Division and would later employ the same camera for the filming of Miami Vice.^[3] The sequence in the nightclub was shot in 35 mm.

Early drafts of Collateral's script set the film in New York City. However, later revisions of the script moved the film's setting to Los Angeles.

Music

The Collateral soundtrack was released on August 3, 2004, by Hip-O Records.^[4]

Track listing

The soundtrack also features the song "Iguazú" written by Gustavo Santaolalla.

Reception

Critical response

The film received positive reviews, with particular praise going to Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx's performances. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 86% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 226 reviews. The critical consensus states that "Driven by director Michael Mann's trademark visuals and a lean, villainous performance from Tom Cruise, Collateral is a stylish and compelling noir thriller."^[5] On Metacritic, the film had an average score of 71 out of 100, based on 41 reviews. Tom Cruise went on to garner critical acclaim, while Foxx received several award nominations.^[6] Richard Roeper placed Collateral as his 10th favorite film of 2004. The film was voted as the 9th best film set in Los Angeles in the last 25 years by a group of Los Angeles Times writers and editors with two criteria: "The movie had to communicate some inherent truth about the L.A. experience, and only one film per director was allowed on the list".^[7]

Box office

The film opened on August 6, 2004, in 3,188 theaters in the United States and Canada and grossed approximately $24.7 million on its opening weekend, ranking #1 at the box office.^[8] It remained in theaters for 14 weeks and eventually grossed $101,005,703 in the U.S. and Canada. In other countries it grossed a total of $116,758,588 for a total worldwide gross of $217,764,291.^[1]

Awards

Notes

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Collateral

• Collateral at the Internet Movie Database
• Collateral at AllMovie
• Collateral at Rotten Tomatoes
• Collateral at Metacritic
• Collateral at Box Office Mojo
• Sight and Sound Interview with Michael Mann