The script works it out as a progression: first, after Max discovers what Vincent is up to, he fails to beg or buy his way out of staying on as Vincent's driver; then Vincent rescues Max from muggers after Vincent has lashed Max's hands to the wheel of the parked taxi while he takes care of business; then Max gets himself in a position in which he has to convince the druglord that he himself is Vincent; and finally Max uses Vincent's own means to defeat him. Which is to say that Max "has to" take on the parts of Vincent's personality that are, regrettably, useful to a man in this wicked world, and discard the rest. Max, thus, doesn't kill Vincent so much as digest him.

Similarly, Jada Pinkett Smith's Annie is the damsel in distress and, in perfect conformance with the allegory, it's the killer Vincent, confident beyond the bounds of common morality, who necessitates Max's calling her, which Max had previously lacked the nerve to do. It is thus significant (though not interesting) that Annie is the prosecutor out to convict Vincent's druglord-employer by calling to the stand the witnesses Vincent kills. Collateral isn't a work of realism so it doesn't matter as much as it otherwise would that once Vincent has killed the four witnesses it would be unnecessarily risky for him to kill the prosecutor whose case he's already destroyed. What matters is that Annie represents the virtue that Max doesn't discard even after he's taken on Vincent's violent aggression, the visceral sense that right is right that he manfully defends in the climax.

Collateral isn't an exposé in the manner of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000), it's a chivalric romance involving a struggle between a white and a black knight (traditional moral color here the opposite of the actors' skin pigmentation, and steeds replaced by the cab). As with all chivalric romances, the topic is what kind of knight the hero will turn out to be, a dramatic subject that gives rise to no suspense whatsoever.

That's a problem, as is the fact that the allegorical framework is too simple to support the action set-pieces (which pale next to the crystal method of Paul Greengrass in The Bourne Supremacy) and the maunderings about jazz improvisation and insignificance. The characters could be called Aggression, Sensitivity, and Morality, and you wouldn't need more than a single-paneled fresco to get out of the interplay all there is to be gotten.

This is where virtuosity comes in. Or should. To put it succinctly, Tom Cruise is the last actor to cast as a character whose keynote is "improvisation." (The same complaint could be made of the whole picture: a coyote can't cross the road without getting sucked into the movie's symbolic matrix.) Even if nothing else were altered, the movie would play better if Cruise and Foxx switched roles. As it is, Foxx, who's been terrific letting loose in a comedy like Booty Call (1997), isn't asked to improvise but to play a timid character who "learns" the importance of improvising. In other words, Foxx is not used for what he's good at, enlivening a movie from its low end, but to demonstrate how an unassuming man can get a new lease on life as an action hero.