To this end, Collateral, at times, plays out like The Best Of Michael Mann. There's the lengthy, inexplicably tense dialogue exchanges, there's L.A presented as a neon netherworld, there's the synth-heavy score. It's all very 1987, is what. Also, the last fifteen minutes are pure Manhunter.

Most important of all though, is that it's fantastic.

Hit-Man flicks are always going to be worthwhile, is what The Duke has deduced. A fella slinking around corridors and then hiding in a cupboard, and someone else comes into the room and the lights don't work, but wait, there's red dot dancing around my chest. Either it's a buncha motherfuckers with those damn laser pens, or I'm about to be killed for reasons I probably wouldn't understand even if he told me, which he's not gonna, since he's a silent assassin. From Le Samurai to Leon to Grosse Point Blanke and all those Hitman video games where you can even shoot the fucking pigs in the pig-pen if you so desire, Hit-Men have always provided hours and hours of quality entertainment.

I was gonna be one myself, truth be told, but a couple factors, i.e., being a pacifist and all, and not really having the arse for it, limited my career prospects. I was hoping maybe I could just break into someone's brothel and have a long chat with them about Kirsten Dunst and maybe they'd rethink their lives. But no. A bullet in the guts, said the agencies, to which I cuttingly spat "Well fuck you then."

But I digress from the point I haven't made yet.

Michael Mann has once again conjured a world before our very eyes, a world of smoke and reflection, of jazz-clubs and foreboding alleyways, of steel-eyed killers and cops drenched in regret. I'm sure it bears little resemblance to the actual real-life locale, but just as Woody Allen cared less about the reality of Manhattan that what it meant to him, so Mann evokes the spirit of L.A., and to molten hell with the facts of the matter.

Tommy Boy Cruise is magnificent here, although truth be told he's never really much less than magnificent in anything. For sure, Far And Away with it's quirky Oirish, and Vanilla Sky, Cameron Crowe's pointless remake of Abre Los Ojos can be locked in an underground vault someplace, but even in the weakest material, Cruise shines. What happens in Collateral is that the material is worthy of him. It's the best thing he's done since Jerry Maguire.