The only thing bigger, quicker, slicker

Each Day, A Film:
January 2nd 2012

Let's keep this endeavour going with Collateral (Mann, 2004).

For those of you who like links; Layer Cake à Matthew Vaughn à Snatch àJason Statham à The Transporter, Frank Martin:


Anyone who knows me will tell you I'm a sucker for cross-continuity appearances.

So, yes, Collateral.




Get with it. Millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars, in a speck on one in a blink. That's us, lost in space. The cop, you, me... Who notices?

There are a lot of interesting aspects to Collateral. Firstly, it's worth bearing in mind that Michael Mann is kind of kick-ass when it comes to formats; Collateral, and later Miami Vice (which, frankly, we'll probably come to during the course of this year) were filmed in HD (with, apparently, the exception of one scene in Collateral, which is only just that little bit more kick-ass, because mixing formats is an absolute bastard at the best of times.)

HD is all kinds of interesting, because the images are wonderful but you have to be very, very careful about movement, because you can get strange edging and motion blurring. So you're alright, unless you're filming the majority of your scenes in a car at night and... oh, wait...

So Collateral has an interesting enough storyline; a cab driver, a contract killer, a single night of woe kicked off by an unfortunate placement underneath a falling "Fat Angeleno", and suddenly Max, the cabbie, is an unwilling participant in a stream of witness killings.

Life's funny like that.

Now, Collateral does run on co-incidences, to be sure. Mostly, it's to do with Max's bad luck; if he'd zoned out just that little bit more at the start, he could have ignored Vincent; if he'd parked six feet in front or behind his position behind the apartments, the body would have missed his cab and he could, in theory, have just driven away; and the doozy of all co-incidences, that his fare at the beginning is Vincent's target at the end, well, call him unlucky, basically.

But Max goes through a curious kind of evolution; at the beginning, he ostensibly gives away his dream in the form of a postcard of the Maldives, although he gets a phone number in trade for it. By the end of the film, however, Max becomes - through a process of taxicab osmosis - pro-active, clever, a little kick-ass, and slightly suicidal, willing to crash his cab while Vincent holds a gun to his head just to derail the final killing.

This is, in theory, character evolution - the kind of thing that comes between the destabilising of the equilibrium at the start of the film and re-establishing the equilibrium at the end - and, for the most part, it's nice and believable, because Max - even after twelve years as a cabbie - has to adjust to the constant presence of violence in human form.

Here's the thing; I chose Layer Cake as the first film of the year because I'd been thinking about it for a while. Not so with Collateral; it just kind of jumped out at me this morning whilst I was going through the DVD collection that comprises tangible evidence that I was once gainfully employed. Because of this, I don't have anything especially insightful to say about the film, but that's not because there isn't any deep, meaningful insight into the film that I care to share, it's just because, well, that's the way things are.

Collateral is, however, a beautiful film that's more about the way cities turn us into insular units than it is about a taxi driver and a contract killer, and this is, in turn, largely down to the way Michael Mann has a giant love for how cities look. Just check out the aerial shots, among other things, for instance.

However, one interesting thing to note is that the city empties out progressively during the course of the film; at the beginning, the streets are full of cars, the sidewalks are crowded, there's lots going on; by the end, Max is often the only car on the road, sharing it with wolves/coyotes in the suburbs and absolutely nobody in the centre. By the end of the film, the only people left seem to be Max, Vincent and Annie, along with sleepy transients on the MTA.  It's partly a film about becoming 'disconnected people', as Vincent puts it.

Anyway; one of the other reasons for watching this is to see one of the first instances of Tom Cruise playing against type. But that's only one of many reasons to see such a beautiful elegy to the city and the people it creates.