Tom's too good

It doesn't matter whether Michael Mann directs Al Pacino in The Insider, Robert De Niro in Heat, Will Smith in Ali, or even Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans. He can produce, executive produce, screen-write, hell, I don't even care if he does the catering on location. So far as I'm concerned, he will for ever remain a guy who thinks raw electric guitar chords, a rock beat and a racing car are the cool epitome of the filmic art. But who am I to quibble? For all I know, he may be right.

On this analysis, Collateral plays to his strengths, because whole swathes of it are cars 'n' chords. The premise of the film is simple: Jamie Foxx plays Max, a hardworking, honest straight-goer of a Los Angeles cab driver, who dreams of starting a luxury limo business and ending up in the Maldives. One evening, he picks up Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith) at LAX. She's a federal prosecutor preparing for a big case which begins the following morning. During the ride, an immediate intimacy is forged, and when Max drops her off in downtown LA we feel certain there is unfinished business between them.

The next fare is a different proposition. Vincent (Tom Cruise) is a hit man in a cream linen suit and fly-eye shades. He affects a studied pimp roll, sports a neatly cropped salt-andpepper beard and totes a tablet-style laptop computer which displays the details of the six contract killings he has been hired to perform that night.

When the first of these "jobs" goes awry and the victim plunges from a fourth-storey window on to the roof of Max's cab, the poor cabbie ends up as the press-ganged accomplice of this psychopathic popinjay: the collateral of the title. Over the next eight hours, the two undertake a journey to the end of the nightmare of contemporary LA as Vincent lays waste to a substantial moiety of its inhabitants.

But coincidence being the very lifeblood of narrative, at the first murder scene Detective Fanning (Mark Ruffalo) moans about the case being glommed off him by the Feds, and we know that soon enough we'll get to see the lovely Annie again. Just as when Vincent delivers his urban-myth riff about how a dead man rode the LA metro for six hours before being noticed, we also understand that what goes around, will, in due course, come around.

I describe Cruise's character as a popinjay because once you have set aside the brouhaha about Mr Nice playing such a nasty fellow, you're left with a bespoke target: buy the implausible hit man and you can suspend disbelief in everything else that happens in this film. But ask yourself for one second whether a psychopath might justify his behaviour by reference to the I-Ching, genocide in Rwanda and the Survival of the Fittest, and the rest of the scenario folds up like a telescope.

Why doesn't Max - who is such an upright fellow - make a sprightlier attempt to get away from Vincent?

We learn, eventually, that he has some balls when he chucks Vincent's laptop under a truck and fronts it up to a narcotics baron, but in the meantime he lets himself be led around like a bemused sheep.

Mann's screenwriter, Stuart Beattie, seems to be offering us, in the death- punctuated conversation between Max and Vincent, a discourse on the nature of existential, urban man. Seems, because in between all the gunfire, screeching of metal and those ubiquitous guitar chords, I found it pretty hard to hear what was actually being said. But that didn't matter too much because Collateral looks great. Shot entirely on location, using specially adapted, high-definition, digital video cameras, Mann's cinematographer, Dion Beebe, captures beautifully the feel of Los Angeles by night.

THIS is not soft, undulating Hollywood, but the hard edges of the downtown grid pattern, and the smeared wasteland of South Central. Dionne's camera roams this sodium-coated immensity of glassy blocks and eightlane highways, cutting continually from the interior of Max's cab to overhead shots of it, coursing like an automotive corpuscle along the city's arteries.