In 40 years on the big screen, Tom Cruise has had the privilege of collaborating with some of the most influential filmmakers in cinema history. From his third film, when he was barely 21 years old, he arrived on the set of a feature film by Francis Ford Coppola, Outsiders, where he opposite Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze and even Ralph Macchio. He subsequently found himself in front of Ridley Scott’s camera (Legend), Tony Scott made him a superstar with Top Gun. Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson exploited its full potential with Eyes Wide Shut et Magnolia, revealing a more neurotic side behind the image of a handsome guy who melts hearts. Brian de Palma laid the foundations for what would become the saga of his life (Mission : Impossible) and Steven Spielberg signed with him his two best films of the 2000s with Minority Report et War of the Worlds.
In 2003, Tom Cruise no longer had much to prove, neither in terms of his credibility as an actor nor in terms of his (immense) popularity in Hollywood. Two options present themselves to him: remain the star that he is, make a series of blockbusters and wait patiently for the public to tire of him; or, at the risk of breaking your teeth, go and shoot with one of the most stimulating and adventurous directors of American cinema to play a terrifying hitman, coldly executing men across Los Angeles, with a companion of route an innocent taxi driver played by Jamie Foxx. This movie exists and it’s called Collateral.
Directed by Michael Mann, whose career was at that point on an irresistible upward slope (his previous three films were Heat, Revelations et Ali), Collateral is certainly the riskiest feature film of their two filmographies to date. Shot in part with a digital camera – far from being a commonplace thing in the early 2000s – the film does not resemble any thriller of the time. The image, grainy and rich in details, shows a nocturnal and sensory Los Angeles, on the border of unreality (we already find, in fragments and in the lines of the highways, the fascination of Michael Mann from Hacker for interconnected and digital worlds).
The representation of the Californian city, sexy and warm, is only a distant memory. Michael Mann only seems interested in transitory spaces, artificial places that never encourage us to want to stay there as spectators. The film, imbued with the solitary atmosphere of contemporary metropolises, begins in an airport and ends in a metro. The taxi, first presented as a place of comfort, of exchanges (whether joyful or not), crosses the path of a parasite, Vincent, played by Tom Cruise, who will make it his deadly carriage.