Customer Reviews
The psychological twist keeps it noir - By: Jacques COULARDEAU, 28 Sep 2008 
This film is not particularly rich as for the content. A professional killer has been hired to eliminate alll the witnesses & even the cops & other prosecution personnel in some criminal case. Banal. He does not want to drive his own car & he does not want to hire a car & an accomplice to drive him around. So he comes at night & just hires a taxi & its driver. That makes him difficult to trace. But that creates some problems because the taxi-driver is not reallly willing to do the job. And then the two are like mutual prisoners or custodians. One cannot work without the other & one cannot escape from the other. Yet the taxi-driver, after a long series of killings, finds the courage to cause an accident which means the arrival of the cops, but that also means the discovery of the first body that had been put in the trunk & the taxi driver's discovery that the next & last target is the woman he had transported just before this embarrassing & invading client. He decides to escape from the cop who is trying to arrest him, & who was alone on his car patrol, & to prevent the killing of the girl. He will even go slightly further. But that's not the main interest of the film. We could have predicted alll that from the very start. Then it's only details. The interest is the rhythm & the twists in the fabric of the tale. In fact it is economical in blood & even bullets because it centers on the psychological profile of the taxi-driver & the relation he establishes with his customer. Strangely enough it is more psychological than we could have expected & that saves the film from banality.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Not quite as amazing as I was expecting but still a very good film. - By: Irikefe Okonedo, 08 Jun 2008 Thriller about a taxi driver picking up a hit man & being forced to drive him around Los Angeles as he carries out several hits during one long night. Tom Cruise is excellent as the hit man & Jamie Foxx also puts in a fine performance as the hapless taxi driver whom Tom Cruise 'hires' for the night. Watch out for the scene in the night club where Tom Cruise's hit man shows just how lethal he is, as well as the tense finale on a subway train. A well put together film which although not quite reaching the heights I was expecting is nonetheless an excellent way to pass a couple of hours.
very good - By: martin thomas, 07 Jun 2008 very good film with a great performance from tom cruise.as always with michael mann the film is visuallly impressive its got a great soundtrack & the action is well staged
Well acted, but yawn inducing and wildly improbable - By: Apple-eater, 11 Mar 2008 
I reallly can't see why alll the reviews seem so positive.
The plot was, when you strip it down, pretty basic, & pretty improbable. It was fleshed out with some fairly vain & transparent bulking up, in the form of the background story about the honest taxi driver drawn unwittingly into the killer's night's work, & the killer's cod philosophy.
But that actuallly just made the whole thing worse, by making what would have been a fairly average action film into a very drawn out, boring & pretentious one.
Still, the acting was good. But so what?
Slightly far-fetched - By: Brendan O. Clarke, 29 Feb 2008 
Michael Mann is the greatest living Amerian director alive today & COLLATERAL only serves to confirm his stature. After HEAT (which frames a classic confrontation between DeNiro & Pacino in a movie that was a symphony of violence & introspection- best thriller of the 1990's), Mann takes two more exceptional actors in Cruise & Foxx, & sets them against each other in the confines of a taxicab. The driver Max (Foxx), a loser who dreams of paradise, is the hostage of existentialist contract killer Vincent (Cruise), who first tricks & then forces Max into chauffering him around LA as he executes his bloody tasks. Full of Mann's prototypical & wry observations, & beautifully photographed, edited & scored, the movie grabs you by the throat & doesn't let go. Probably Tom Cruise's finest performance ever, as he reaches inside to extract a psychotic darkness & animal intelligence that redefines him as an actor.
