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Dom Robinson reviews
Paramount
- Cert:
- Cat.no: PHE 8956
- Running time: 105 minutes
- Year: 2004
- Pressing: 2005
- Region(s): 2, PALn
- Chapters: 20 plus extras
- Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1
- Languages: English, French, German
- Subtitles: 24 languages available
- Widescreen: 2.35:1
- 16:9-Enhanced: Yes
- Macrovision: Yes
- Disc Format: 2*DVD 9
- Price: £22.99
- Extras:City of Night: The Making of Collateral; Deleted scene with commentary, Director’s Commentary,Featurettes: Special Delivery, Shooting on Location, Tom Cruise & Jamie Foxx rehearse, Visual FX: MTA Train
Director:
- Michael Mann
(Ali, Arms and the Man, Collateral, The Few, Heat, The Insider, The Keep, L.A. Takedown, Last of the Mohicans, Manhunter, Miami Vice (2006), Thief)
Producers:
- Michael Mann, Julie Richardson and Michael Waxman
Screenplay:
- Stuart Beattie
Music:
- James Newton Howard
Cast:
- Vincent: Tom Cruise
Max: Jamie Foxx
Annie: Jada Pinkett Smith
Detective Fanning: Mark Ruffalo
Detective Weidner: Peter Berg
Pedrosa: Bruce McGill
Ida: Irma P Hall
Daniel: Barry Shabaka Henley
Felix: Javier Bardem
Airport Man: Jason Statham
The first thing you notice about Collateralis Tom Cruise’s hair (right) – A bouffant grey affair that you expect Simon Cowell will end up within another 10 years, providing he’s not dining out on Grecian 2000.
Los Angeles – a city of 17 million people where nobody knows your name and driving out there eachand every night is Max (Jamie Foxx, bottom-right), a cabbie who has high dreams of what he’d like to do andconsistently maintains that this job is just temporary despite having done it for the last 12 years.
His first memorable fare of the evening comes in the form of lawyer Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith),who gives him her card and leads him to his next one, Vincent (Tom Cruise), who pays him to drivefor the night, which is against regulations but a hefty tip persuades our dreamer. However, thingsgo horrendously out of control for Max as the night pads out while his latest fare stays super-cool.
Vincent wants to make five stops and then get to the airport, but the first stop results in a manlanding on the roof of Max’s car, shaking the cabbie to hell and back. Bemused, he asks Vincent,“You killed him?!”, to which the calm reply comes, “No, I shot him… the bullets and thefall killed him.”
Over the night, their relationship, for want of a better word, takes many dramatic turns, few of whichare predictable, but what is inevitable is that the police get wind of these ‘disturbances’, the firstone being Detective Fanning (Mark Ruffalo) who gets on their trail because the first victim isone of his informants.
Peter Berg is in this briefly as Fanning’s partner, ever-sceptical because the FBI like to take anycredit established by the LAPD and claim it for themselves, so he doesn’t see the need to bother. Cruiseis his usual ever-reliable self, thus proving that even if he does have the wacky beliefs of a nutteroff-screen, he *keeps* them off-screen. Foxx also pulls a good turn, his character going through achange which echoes along the lines of The Smith’s Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want”with, “Seen the luck I’ve had, can make a good man turn bad…”
Finally, and to its great credit, Collateral does have a satisfying ending, which is somethingmost films rarely succeed in attaining.
N.B. The title of the film comes and goes quickly in a line spoken by Max as it’s the point where herealises there’s no escape from his position with Vincent and that he has to see this through. Thatmakes him Vincent’s “collateral” in case anything goes wrong.
When it comes to the fantastic anamorphic picture with no problems visible, the 2.35:1 framing isvery tight so this will not sit well when cropped to 16:9 on TV, particularly the cab interior sceneswith Vincent in the back on the left-hand side of the screen and Max in the front on the right.Part of the film is shot with the Super 35 process, however, and the ‘making of’ shows that scenes shotthat way lend to a far more comfortable 16:9 print than, say, those in the cab which are destroyedin the cropping to 16:9. It appears that the scenes that will suffer are those shot on high-definitionvideo, as discussed later, and these account for around 85% of the film’s footage according to thedirector.
There’s not a massive amount of split-surround sound going on in the Dolby Digital 5.1 soundmix, butthis is made up for in spades with some fantastic use of the 2.35:1 visuals.
Firstly, the supplemental material has more languages for subtitles than you can shake a stick at.There’s 24 here, including English. The inclusion of English might sound obvious but there are somedistributors who are happy to add subtitles for every language under the sun on some DVDs… apartfrom English, for no apparent reason.
All of the extras appear on disc 2, apart from Michael Mann’s Director’s Commentary, for obviousreasons. What’s less obvious is why each of the following isn’t chaptered, despite lasting some length:
- City of Night: The Making of Collateral (41:00):Tom Cruise is shown to be a perfectionist as he learns how to shoot a gun and then do his own fightscenes so it’s such a shame he can’t combat the inner sense of utter bollocks when he speaks aboutScientology. Jamie Foxx learns how to drive a cab by heading off to a race track so he knows howto handle those tight turns you get used to when you become a cabbie, apparently.
Elsewhere, Jada Pinkett Smith, Michael Mann, Barry Shabaka Henley and Mark Ruffalo all get their sayabout their parts in the movie and there’s on-set footage included from several key scenes.
This featurette, and all the others except where stated, is in 16:9 with film clips in 16:9, shownas described earlier on in this review.
- Special Delivery (1:09)leads the way for a number of much shorter featurettes, this one being about how Tom Cruise isrecognisable everywhere he goes, unlike the intention of his character here, so he dresses up asa FedEx man and attempts to deliver a package without anyone saying, “Hey, it’s that Scientologynutball!” 🙂
- Deleted Scene with commentary (1:57):Presented in anamorphic 2.35:1, I won’t say what happens, but it’s nothing particular to writehome about. Strangely, the director’s commentary is not optional here on this scene. You have to haveit.
- Shooting on Location (2:33):I won’t say which location is featured here as it could spoil the plot, but Michael Mann tells us thatas it was a dark scene it was helped by shooting in high-definition video, as most of it was filmed,in order to get detail in such a situation that wouldn’t normally be there.
- Tom Cruise & Jamie Foxx rehearse (4:13):This does exactly what it says on the tin and concentrates on key scenes based around the cab journiesthey make. Occasionally, we get the finished version presented alongside the rehearsal for comparison.
- Visual FX: MTA Train (2:27):The reason for the use of green screen in the final scene, and it’s surprisingly clever.
So, almost a full hour of footage in the above which is a good set of extras, but a lot of this stuffis watch-once-only and not the kind of thing that you’ll go back to and, as such, it should all have fittedon the first disc had that not been so crammed with subtitles and audio languages. As for the DVD menus,they feature film clips and music that repeats after a short time but retains the theme of the film.There are subtitles in 24 languages so it’s unlikely anyone will miss out, and the 20 chapters shouldhave been increased as 20 isn’t enough for a 2-hour film and the first one is ridiculously long at 12:47.
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Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.