Re: RARA-AVIS: Re: Holiday watching: Collateral

From: Al Guthrie ( allanguthrie@ukonline.co.uk)
Date: 29 Dec 2004


I loathed that movie.

SPOILER A supposed professional hit man drives around in a beat-up taxi with a corpse in the trunk, after royally screwing up a very simple job. How on earth did such an incompetent fool manage to stay in business for the previous six years? I spent most of the movie getting angrier and angrier that Cruise didn't dump the taxi. And when the police finally pulled the taxi over, fate intervened, which was horribly unsatisfactory. Surely now, though, I thought, he'll dump the taxi. He's learned his lesson. It's been spelled out to him in a very unsubtle manner. But, no, he gets back in and carries on as if the incident with the police never happened. I just about walked out of the cinema at that point, and had I been on my own I would have done.

Cruise's character also sends Foxx into a club to pretend to be him. Why didn't Foxx just run away, go to the police and get them to protect his mother? And the final hit. Why would he go to the office? It's the middle of the night. The only person who knows Pinkett Smith is working late is Foxx.

Somebody mentioned similarities with HEAT. Aside from asking a lot of the audience (HEAT SPOILER: when the wheelman can't make the heist cause he can't shake off his police tail, the gang are eating in a diner where another wheelman *entirely coincidentally* happens to work -- and they just happen to have been in prison together and the ex-wheelman just happens to be fed up with going straight, etc.) Pacino and Cruise's characters share the same name, Vincent.

Anybody who wants to see a superb movie about a hitman should look out for the low-budget British noir, MR IN-BETWEEN, based on the book by Neil Cross.

Al

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