"A guy gets on the metro here in LA and dies. Do you think anybody'll notice?"

As I add more movies to my repertoire, you the reader shall find that there is no logic to the selections I make; if nothing else I hope not to fall into any sort of pattern, lest I begin to get boring. I'll mostly be trying to tap into underrated, overrated, and largely undiscovered movies. Obviously there is no point in singing the praises of say, "The Shawshank Redemption," my favorite film, as it has already been universally praised.

Back to the topic at hand, "Collateral" is a film I watched quite recently, rather in correspondance with Michael Mann's latest effort, "Public Enemies," which I loved, but that discussion will have to wait for another time, when I've fully collected my thoughts in a manner adaptable to a blog post.

"Collateral" is a movie which I did not fully realize the value of until I had seen the film a few times. It's not Mann's best movie, but very possibly his most entertaining, and one which I find to be enormously pertinent to humanity. This may sound a bit shallow, but I truly find the relationship between the unwitting taxi driver and the precise, confident assassin to be fascinating and oddly addicting, as this is a movie that has yet to wear on me.



Michael Mann does demonstrate his love for two central characters, on opposite sides of the ethical line, revealing a great deal about each other. As trite as it may sound, Mann finds exactly the right pitch, as do Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx, to portray these characters. Cruise, especially, often underrated and dismissed because of his fame, gives a highly intriguing turn.

Of course, Foxx has a more important part to play, as he is the identifier with the audience. He is the everyman, Joe the Plumber, the epitome of a guy in a crappy job that one falls into after losing grips on one's dreams. I mean, how much more average can you get than driving a cab?

So, as Foxx's cabbie is presented with a harrowing, life-or-death situation, he is awoken to the truth of the outside world. As Cruise's Vincent notes, they're just tiny dots on the surface of the planet amidst countless galaxies, and "who notices?" Foxx's Max turns the tables on Vincent, waking up from his interminable stupor and embracing the life that has been given to him, rather than watching it roll by.

There is a beautiful scene after one of the more intense action setpieces when Max attempts to psychoanalyze Vincent, who rebounds with saying everything that Max fears in the deepest trenches of his soul; Max claims to be working on a limo company and that driving a taxi is only temporary, yet he's been doing it for 12 years. He accomplished getting a number of a girl earlier on in the night, a number which Max knows deep inside him that he will never call. Max knows, as Vincent tells him, that one day he'll be old and decrepit, and his dreams will have evaded his grasp. Of course, Vincent doesn't have to say any of this to Max. He could sit in the back of the cab and not speak a word of outreach to his driver as he goes around town killing people, but Vincent finds a twisted kind of friend in Max because he is average. Vincent has lived a life of torment and suffering, abandoning moral direction and being locked into a prison of doing the same thing for the rest of his life, or being killed himself. In the average person, Vincent sees the true nature of so much of humanity--we, like Max, feel imprisoned by our circumstances. We pity ourselves, we wish we could attain our highest dreams, but don't really do anything about it. Vincent couldn't change his life path if he wanted to. He kills or is killed. It is this contrast that makes the insights of the film so authentic, and ingenious.