"To quote the movie: It's cool. Which means it's good, but not ready. Thanks, Mister Mann, for summing it up in a discretionary bit of dialogue. Those were my thoughts exactly...Someone, please, buy this man a pair of scissors. Make 'em sharp. And force the mother f'er to use 'em."
(I'm trying desperately to write a review for this film, but there's a screaming maniac behind me. It's hard to think. I can't concentrate...)
Hell Mission Statement #40965: COLLATERAL
"That Michael Mann sure likes to watch a nigger run." Mickey G. said that to me after seeing this film. Mike is black, so it's okay for him to say that. Or so I've been told. Hey, if you're of a certain descent, you can say whatever the heck you want to. Unless you're white. Then it's a no-no. I probably shouldn't even be typing it in retrospect. But it's true. Michael Mann likes to watch a nigger run.
Ali wasn't on my mind when I sat down in that hard cushioned chair inside the Mann's Chinese Theater (is Michael Mann related to this theater chain in any way, or what? Is he the one making stale popcorn so expensive? That guy's a jerk...If it's true!) F*ck, that seat hurt my ass (did you know a black man invented the folding chair?). If you visit the Mann's Chinese 6, that offshoot above the Kodak Theater, where they hold the Academy Awards, don't forget to bring one of those little inflatable donuts. You're going to need it. Heck, you'd need it for Open Water, which is only 79 minutes long (or short, as it where.) But for a Mike Mann film, it's an absolute necessity. The guy makes movies that are exceptionally long without a reason or a point of being. LOTR is three hours in running length. Why? Because it had a lot of stuff shoved inside it's bloated walls. It needed to be extensive in its means to entertain. There was literally that much narrative going on. Not here. Collateral is a 40 minute short story stretched past its contraventions. That type of sh*t hurts my Christmas Tree Ornament; call it the Comeback Kid. If I have to wade through another boring expose on gun control, I might be forced to snip it off with a pair of toenail clippers. Ouch...
As I sat there watching the opening moments of Collateral, I immediately thought of the 2001 Oscar nominated Ali. I hadn't yet put two and two together. But here I was, once again watching people run forever in long shot. For insurmountable amounts of time. Just as I had at the beginning of Ali, which inexplicably featured the longest opening credit sequence in history. Will Smith took a quick nod from Forrest Gump, and he just kept running. Funny, but that's the only thing I remember about the movie. And Ali has some rich history behind him. Sad that all I can recall from his extended biography is Will Smith jaunting about the streets of some desolate, unnamable town. I'm not a liar when I say Collateral is more of the same. I had to turn to Blake Snyder, who was enigmatically sitting beside me, and ask, "Did Michael Mann direct Ali, too?"
"Yup." So, I guess Mann's one of those oft spoken about, yet hardly ever seen visionaries. A true auteur. How do I know? Because I could tell it was his film. Right away. His stamp known as "the boring lag" is hand-pounded all over this sucker. Collateral is like a book of still photographs. There are long pauses held on a single shot; a close-up of Tom Cruise pontificating under that powdered wig for what seems like fifteen minutes. We are refused the cutaway. Jamie Foxx scrunching his forehead is a Polaroid picture thumb-tacked to the screen like a poster on your cubicle at work. It just hangs there, motionless. Quiet. Oh, but there are also inactionary-action sequences. Mann holds on Foxx running down the street. We see Cruise take a walk that lasts longer than the movie itself. Various parts of this even-flow swayed me into a brain-dead coma. I had to kick myself awake whenever expository dialogue decided to punch itself across the screen.
It reminds me of Joe Black, a movie that was about nothing more than Brad Pitt walking. It also reminds me of Ghost Dog (a six minute movie stretched into an 80 minute yawn-fest), it was nothing more than Forest "I'm-a-Dick" Whitaker slowly driving around the city under street lamps with no intended destination. Collateral sort of takes those two conceits and smashes them together. It is different because it has driving and walking, and running. A lot of it. Yeah, it has everything. It's the goddamn LA marathon...
Except without the weirdoes and the Stormtroopers.
Snyder, that bastard; he suggests that it's a revived riff on the ol' Training Day esthetic. I can't deny him that. Cruise is aping it. Possibly worse than Denzel did. Does that mean Tom is struggling his weight towards an Oscar nod? Could be. Probably. Training Day and Collateral are practically the same movie, with the racial epitaphs reversed. It's good cop-bad cop in the backseat of a cab. Jimmy Fallon better watch out, these guys have the Taxi route armed with a spike strip (Besides, how could Queen Latifah be cooler than a French guy delivering a pizza? She can't, it's impossible...).
Now, don't get me wrong. All of this bitching in forecasted weather doesn't mean I hate the film. Quite the contrary. I liked Collateral a lot. The performances, all around, are made of crack-addict perfectionism. The film's just got a lot of flab drifting about its visible panty line. I love green olives, but I hate bologna. Watching Collateral is like having to chew pimentos out of a package of olive loaf. Every once in awhile, you hit this pocket of flavor that has you craving more. So you keep munching on it, hoping to reach another ring of tasty green goodness. Trust me, your taste glands will be treated right in starts and stops. And that ending; what a glorious spurt of non-stop edibility. There's a shoot-out in K-Town (Blake & I's home away from home) that touches the sides of the tongue like a cantaloupe-flavored Jolly Rancher sprinkled with salt.
I enjoyed certain parts of this movie so much, I wanted to run into Michael Mann's house and shove a pair of garden sheers in his hands. I want to put a gun to his head and demand that he re-edits this work-in-progress. What? Was there pressure at the deadline? Could he not finish it in time? Or am I just way too conditioned to the one-second edits as dolled out by my local Maitreyaplex in the last ten years? Possibly. But come on, there's an overlong scene in the cab. Jamie Foxx eats a sandwich while masturbating over the top of a car brochure. It's an over-extended exposes on the monotony of the human spirit. It's a stylistic choice, I guess. Sorry, these shoes don't fit my feet. Cut it on the dotted line. Eviscerate it and get it out of my face...
Or keep it in; I don't care. Just warn me next time and offer me a pillow at the box office window. They're kind enough to have this service on an airplane. Why not the movie theater too? I paid more for my admission ticket, you cheap chain store nazis...
***And now, I'm going to ruin the movie for you*** ALERT...(Not really, you can read the next two or three paragraphs, and still enjoy what little there is to enjoy about this flick)
People are still making a big stink about the Village. Mostly about it's trickster "Twilight Zone" ending (I haven't seen the movie; so tell me, what does that mean? Does a Vietnamese kid get his head lopped off by a rotating helicopter blade?). Collateral, too, hoping not to miss the shifty summer cliffhanger, also implores the use of it's own fake-you-out conclusion.
At first, I thought Collateral was a movie about fate (which it is, kinda). A hot little tight-assed bitch gets in Jamie Foxx's cab. He takes the sexy lady to her after-hours office building. They hit it off on the ride across town. She leaves him her business card. Then she goes inside, never to be seen again. Jamie's heart is overfilled with joy. He sits, for something like twenty minutes, staring at that business card with her name on it. Then Tom Cruise gets in the car and takes Foxx on a wild ride through LA. Jamie should be happy that he picked Jada up, even though she's whoring it on the other side of town. But now he's in danger for his life. He might die. If that woman had of never gotten in his cab in the first place, he wouldn't have a gun to his head.
F*ck, this sounds just like the type of thing that would happen to me. Some awesome incident happens. I meet the girl of my dreams, and then I'm severely punished for happening upon this tiny ray of sunshine. That's basically what happens to Jamie Foxx. His life is sh*t. Then the ever-hot Jada gets in his cab. This gives him some much-needed hope. But that hope goes right out the window as soon as Ol' Man Tommy crawls into the backseat...
I didn't think we'd see Jada again. I thought she was being used as some varied type of metaphor. Nope. She comes back in the last act. Jamie has to save her from being shot up by Thom Fooze. The prick wants to disembowel her soul. He literally turns into the Terminator by the end of the picture. It's almost a little ridiculous how he gets off the floor after being shot in the face, and then trudges ahead like a runaway tsunami. Oh, but there is some reasoning behind it. It is soon revealed to the audience that Tom's Vincent is actually a slaughtering Cupid whose bow and arrow of Love just happens to be a .45.
Yes. He causes all of these tiny disasters just to bring our two leads together in a loving embrace. It's a lot like Final Destination, with Cruise bouncing around town, creating all of these Rube Goldberg-like accidents that eventually find Jada and Jamie side-by-side, fighting for their life. We, the audience, know that Foxx never would have called her back after she gave him that flirty business card. Tom had to step in and make it happen. So what if a bunch of people died along the way. Even though we don't see them kiss, we know they raped each other as soon as that closing curtain came down and those credits went up.
Sadly, as we all know from Speed 2, relationships formed in the middle of a crisis never work out. These guys will be divorced and seeing other people by the time Collateral 2: Disposition trots itself across that Blockbuster "3 DVDs for $20" wasteland.
It's a cinematic rule of truth. So is, "B. Alan Orange is an intestinal fissure." That fact is inescapable.
Tom Cruise is a homicidal Cupid that brings Jada Pinket-Smith and Jamie Foxx together in coitus, there in the back of a broken down cab. That's this movie's MO. Take it, or leave it on the ground. Writhing in pain...
Ouch, it f*cking hurts...
F*ckers...
I hate you Mann's Chinese Six. And I don't like you very much either, Michael Mann. Stop ruining your movies. Hire a trained editor. Or be willing to give me my money back...
"Orange, you didn't pay to see this movie."
I don't care. Give it to me anyway!
"Shut up."
No. You shut up.
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"If you've spent your summer searching for the proverbial "edge of your seat" at the movies, you'll definitely find it seeing Collateral, because that's where you'll be for nearly the entire movie." ByBrian Gallagher
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