20 years ago, Michael Mann’s ‘Collateral’ lit up L.A.

Tom Cruise, in a rare villain turn, played a hitman holding Jamie Foxx’s cab driver hostage over the course of a long night in Los Angeles.

Michael Mann’s films always have grand openings: the heist in Heat, the montage in Ali, the nightclub in Miami Vice, and even the interview with the Hezbollah guy in The Insider. 

Another great one is Collateral, which was released in August 2004, 20 years ago today. 

The film opens with cab driver Max (Jamie Foxx) picking up two fares in his cab. His first is Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith), a prosecutor. The second is Vincent (Tom Cruise), a mysterious “businessman” who’s in town overnight to “close a deal” and offers Max $600 to take him to several stops throughout the night. 

The trailer, one of the best of its era, laid all of that out:

It turns out Vincent is a hitman hired to kill a half-dozen people to prevent a witness from testifying the following day, and he ends up essentially holding Max hostage throughout the night. 

The film, which was released less than a decade after the director’s other great L.A. crime saga, Heat, features many of the director’s trademarks: cool nighttime photography, men on a determined mission, and outstanding use of otherwise underused character actors. 

However, one thing I have always loved about Collateral is how it confounds our expectations about the two leads. It has Jamie Foxx — known mostly up to that point for comedies — as something of a sad sack, a cab driver with big dreams about starting a high-end car service, while Tom Cruise does not only a rare turn as a villain but has (I believe) his only performance with gray hair.