Collateral is a summer thriller that will keep you at the end of your seat while drawing out the characters that we both care for and hiss at the same time. Tom Cruise plays a hit man named Vincent with a job to kill five people in one night and then leave. They are all associated with an important drug case that the feds are prosecuting. Jamie Foxx is a taxi driver named Max with dreams but dreams that he is not willing to take risks for. Throughout the movie, he keeps telling himself and others, he can only pursue his dream when it is all perfect. Foxx is risk averse but on this night, he is thrust by chance in a situation where being risk averse will end his life.
Max picks up Jada Pinkett Smith, a district attorney preparing for a big case. These two people are a contrast. She is driven and ambitious whereas he is but a dreamer. They argue over the quickest way to the hotel but Max prevails and wins the bet that his direction is the quickest and he even save his customer five dollars. At the end, she gives him her card and then he picks up another rider, who happens to be Vincent.
From here, the dialogue and action takes over. Max is offered $600 to take Vincent around on a "real estate deal" and he takes it. Only after the first stop does he realize that Cruise real mission has nothing to do with real estate as Cruise’s first “client” falls out of the window and on Foxx’s cab. Vincent tells Max he did not kill the client but the bullets and fall did. They place the body in the trunk and Max finds himself trapped with a psychopath dressed up as a yuppie stockbroker.
Vincent is as much a philosopher, as a hit man as he chides Max for caring more about this one man than millions who have died in the world. Collateral is a morality play, which plays on two levels. We are not sympathetic to Tom Cruise’s career but his first four victims are criminals and as Cruise justify its; he is merely taking out the garbage. It is not like we should have sympathy for those he kills. Somehow, we are asked to take a second look at Vincent’s job and mission as we see our government using the testimony of one group of criminals to convict another. Of course, this all changes when the final victim is the district attorney, whose job is to prosecute the case. The second level is Max is forced to summon up courage to challenge Vincent and take a risk. He finds himself force to extricate himself from situations such as being stopped by two cops and having to face Felix, a drug dealer on whose behalf Vincent is working for.
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