Thar be major fucking spoilers:

The third act of Collateral is shit. Ask me how Collateral was, and my first impulse is to say, "It was pretty good, but the third act was shit." Things had been going pretty well throughout the rest of the movie, and then they have one of those machine-made finales. So machine-made in fact, and so out of place tonally with the rest of the movie, that it reminded a whole lot of the finale of Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation. It divides the characters into a superhuman villain, a woman in need of rescue, and a reluctant hero who rediscovers his masculinity (i.e. worthiness as an inhabitant of the urban jungle) in saving the girl and slaying the villain.

The villain is Vincent, a contract killer hired by a drug kingpin to eliminate various key witnesses to his case. Vincent has hired Max, a cab driver, to chauffer him to his hits. Before picking up Vincent, Max had given a ride to Annie, a federal prosecutor. They hit it off and she gives him her number. At the end of the movie, Max discovers that she is to be Vincent's last hit and he must save her. This leads to one of those scenes where he calls to warn her that Vincent is coming after her and she wastes time telling him that it's too late to be talking to him. This goes on for a long time. He tells her that Vincent was hired by the drug kingpin Felix to rub her out, and she wonders out loud how he knows about her case. The filmmakers seem to be trying to cue us into screaming, "You stupid bitch, get the fuck out of there!" at the screen. There is something distressingly sexist about having her be a stupid-bitch lawyer, like the lawyer stuff is just salad dressing to the fact that she is a stupid bitch at heart. Just as the cab driver stuff is just salad dressing to the fact that Max is Superman at heart. The movie seems to be saying that class lines are ephemeral; the gender line of woman at the mercy of man is concrete.

Most critics mention that the last act doesn't shape up, and they forgive it. Yeah, I have to say that I do to. I have to concede that we are spared having Vincent come back to life for one last scare. And we are spared Max uttering some choice one-liner before planting one on Annie. The whole sequence is well-done from a technical standpoint and I don't think I would have minded as much if it had ended another movie. Looking at the bad ending hall of fame, I remember Sphere, which proved that the film was one elaborate crossword puzzle, capable of involving you until you knew the answer. Even worse was the recent The Village, no great shakes as a movie to begin with but with an ending that spilled ink all over that which came before it, leaving a black and sticky mess. Collateral, on the other hand, just feels premature. Like they just gave up. The rest of the movie is more than salvageable then. In fact, more regrettable than the fact that we are cheated out of the correct last quarter of the movie is the fact that the quality of the first three quarters is wasted on the people who don't mind that last quarter. A co-worker who had seen and enjoyed the film suggested that maybe they were trying to set things up for a sequel. God help us.

The chief problem with the last bit of Collateral is that they reduced the material to overly simplistic terms of "good" and "evil," when the rest deals with a far richer and much more fascinating dichotomy. Director Michael Mann's visualization of Los Angeles could probably be best described as "Blade Runner meets Boys N the Hood." The warmth of the homey South Central area coexists with icy neon lights and towering skyscrapers. The style reflects the thematic backbone of the film, which is divided similarly by matching the humanist Max, symbolizing L.A. as gemeinschaft, with the Social Darwinist Vincent, symbolizing L.A. as gesellschaft. At their very first meeting Max tries to make small talk with Vincent, asking him if he likes L.A. Vincent responds that whenever he comes here, he can't wait to leave. He laments how people are so detached from one another here, and relates a story about how a corpse rode the subway for hours with people getting on and getting off without even noticing. Max, obviously overwhelmed by the argument, nervously and half-angrily calls this city his "home."

I have to acknowledge some sort of force that's keeping my words from flowing properly. It's not a simple case of "writer's block." Rather, it's more of a fear of revealing my naivety, of making unsupported presumptions and generalizations that will reveal my ignorance toward race. None of the other reviews mentioned or read anything into Max's blackness. I guess that they think that it's insignificant. Or maybe too sticky to get into. I'll concede that the topic never comes up directly in Collateral, but I nonetheless think it's essential in real in-depth discussion of the film. Race doesn't mean a lot to Vincent. He believes that people, black, white, Latino et cetera are essentially rats gnawing at the same decaying piece of meat. With Max though, I sense that he sees his blackness as meaning that he belongs to something. That it somehow ties him in with "real people." Our sympathies, and the film in general, belong to Max. But Vincent exists clearly to tempt Max into despair.

There is a good scene where Vincent visits a jazz musician who relates a story about how he once met Miles Davis and jammed with him. It is then revealed that the musician is an informer on Vincent's hit list, and he is promptly executed. He's mystified (by association with Davis) and then demystified, to show that there is nothing more but a little man behind the curtain after all. Understand that jazz is a uniquely African-American art form, one legitimized by the academic elite as having great significance to human civilization as a whole. Vincent's attack on the jazz musician is an attack on art itself. It's an attack on the belief that man could ever rise above his basest instincts. It's an attack on the belief that there is a need or a will in the human condition beyond that of finding another fix.

This is the second time that Vincent murders somebody right in front of Max. The first is after Max, having been tied to his car while Vincent goes about his business, calls for help and is greeted by a hooligan who takes his wallet and Vincent's suitcase. Vincent comes out in time and brutally executes him. This is probably the most vivid example of how Max has been deluded into believing that he belonged to a community, and is perhaps his rudest awakening. There is a kinky charge to seeing the arrogant mugger get two in the chest when confronted with Vincent. And then casually, as he is walking away, he puts one in the skull. The mugger is white, a choice that seems to smart a little of cowardice. They seemed to have made it for the same reason they changed the pimp in Taxi Driver from black to white: to neutralize that kinky charge of comeuppance. I suppose the color line would divorce the mugger from Max's world and thus also neutralize that whole "gemeinschaft vs. gesellschaft" conflict. It probably would have worked better if the mugger was of color, but it works all the same. The scene is funny, shocking (I could have sworn I heard this guy's skull crack against the pavement by the impact) and provocative.

The relationship between Max and Vincent reminded me, quite literally, of Satan and Christ in Passion of the Christ where Satan gloatingly cradles a demonic dwarf in her arms parodying Raphael's "Madonna and Child" and taunting Christ into rejecting the lie of the Father and embracing the reality of decay. But ultimately, Collateral transcends its Passion play roots by developing Vincent into a bit of a human being. He says that his father was a drunk and he was kicked around foster homes. He was warped by a childhood full of abuse. I sort of thought that he would then laugh and say that he lied, that he grew up in a nice home with wealthy parents and kills for a living because he realized he's good at it and it pays well. But no, he seems to be telling the truth. The only thing that he laughs and says he lied about was killing his father. Dad died of liver disease apparently. I sense that Vincent doesn't really like what he does for a living; rather, he seems resigned to it. He reeks of failed idealism and even of failed compassion. Before he kills the musician, Vincent offers to let him leave town, provided he can tell him where Miles Davis learned to play. The musician guesses wrong, saying that he learned in college. The right answer, Vincent utters thoughtfully after the fact, was under the tutelage of Charlie Parker after he dropped out of college. I don't think that he knows the history of Miles Davis backwards and forwards for the exclusive purpose of intimidating the musician.

The killing of the mugger isn't made into a whole big thing either; Vincent does it without even really thinking about it. His pattern of "two in the chest, one in the head" is almost a reflex, honed by years of practice. It would take some effort for him to shoot somebody in any other way. There isn't any passion behind it. He tells Max that if he doesn't want any more innocent people to be killed, he would be wise to not call attention to himself. Later, when Max destroys his hit list, Vincent forces him to get a replacement, threatening to kill his mother and him if he does not cooperate. Even these statements are primarily functional; their use as argumentative tactics is only secondary. Vincent is not "evil" then; his attitudes stem more from a sense of cynicism than one of sadistic hedonism.

I certainly think that it would be cornball, and highly unrealistic, if Max turned Vincent over to his side, giving him back faith in humanity. But Vincent nonetheless has a heart, and the mere suggestion that something like that could potentially happen gives his relationship with Max a little meat. Vincent can take just as he can give. As much as I lament much of the film's third act, I ultimately have very complex feelings toward the scene where Max kills Vincent. It's one of those bits where the bad guy teases the good guy by saying something along the lines of, "You don't have the balls to shoot me." The good guy does in fact have the balls, and nails the bad guy. The good guy is saying to the bad guy is that he is bad too, and thus worthy of his respect. This scene was done perfectly in the Wachoski Brother's Bound where the lesbian gangster moll Violet proved to her sugar daddy Caesar that she was more of a wise guy than he was, or in the mythological Platoon where young Tyler proves to his evil father figure Sgt. Barnes that he has the stuff to be a killer. When Max kills Vincent, we are reluctant to call it a triumph for either party. Vincent is shot in the belly, on the subway, and smiles to Max telling him that he will fulfill that urban legend he told him when they first met. And yet the death isn't humiliating or abrupt; Vincent dies with a sense of resignation to it all. Max has proved that he is a killer, just like Vincent. But an earlier taunt of his, where Max tells him that he doesn't have the parts that normal people are suppose to have, is harshly contradicted. Vincent does in fact have all the parts that all people have. Max can see them as he dies. Vincent's last words amount to a private joke between the two men. We detect an intimacy and realize that even if it could be explained away as a case of Stockholm Syndrome, it's an intimacy all the same.

Early reaction to Collateral suggests that Michael Mann took some banal material and just directed the shit out of it. Walter Chaw feels that the film places Mann on the level of Spielberg and Kubrick (and less directly Scorsese, Jane Campion and Nicholas Roeg) in terms of pure visual mastery. "This is an audaciously empty-headed picture," he writes. "Mann fiddling around with making a poem out of a sledgehammer." Very high praise, but I'll be damned if he isn't exactly that good. There is a moment late in the film where some coyotes cross the road and both Vincent and Max just stare at them. I have no idea what they mean, but I sense that they do. But the scene is shot, edited and directed in a way that produces a deep reaction all the same. They seem to be symbolic of the calm before a storm, signs on the road suggesting that this is going to be a long long long night for everybody involved. That's the feeling anyway; it could be simply that Mann is bleeding cinema out of a turnip, dazzling us with smoke and mirrors.

But I have a curious problem with Mann's films; it's a problem that I sort of had with The Bourne Supremacy which I saw directly before this, and the problem that I had with The Godfather Part II. These films are a little too "mature." Mature in the strictest sense of the word: all the childish pleasures in them are eliminated. The films don't snap, crackle or pop, I guess because snapping, crackling and popping are byproducts of our infantile junk food culture. I have been looking into the backlash against David Lynch's Blue Velvet again and I've come back to Roger Ebert's infamous pan where he argues that David Lynch hasn't earned the right to show Isabella Rossellini being mistreated like she is. If he is going to use those images, he has to use them in the context of an important movie. Well, I sort of feel that way about serious movies. As most filmgoers will tell you, a serious movie is usually harder to sit through than one where a woman is being raped. And so if you are going to make a serious movie, you better make sure that you are making something important enough to justify the seriousness. Heat didn't do a whole lot for me. The Insider was better, but I'm not sure it was profound or important enough to justify its seriousness.

I liked Manhunter though, and I liked this. Mann has a symbiotic relationship with popular material; it brings him back to earth and he brings it out of the ghetto where most popular material resigns. I haven't read Red Dragon, but I will before I take on the Hannibal Lecter trilogy for my Ed Gein series. It looks like a solid crime novel, but I think there are some key structural and thematic problems that will probably rank it below Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal in my mind. But anyway, the entire Manhunter vs. Ratner's Red Dragon fiasco shows how badly we need Mann's contribution. Both films are probably poor adaptations of the source material. Manhunter moves so fast and covers so much material that it borders on incoherent. And it's serious; it has a tasteful omnipotent documentary quality. Very icy. Red Dragon plays out with much more clarity and much more warmth, but it's an atrocity and a monument to Ratner's idiocy. Manhunter sort of makes you want to rise to the occasion; Red Dragon is placating right down to its very bones. He may occasionally have a stick up his ass, but Michael Mann can take comfort in the fact that he's not Brett Ratner.

Mann seems to be primarily a visual director that lets his actors more or less do whatever it is they do. None of the performances in his films seem to break any new ground. They get the job done; you get what you expect from them and there aren't any goof-ups. In regards to the performances in Collateral then, it's strange how some critics have seen it cause to praise Jamie Foxx (playing Max in the film) as a revelation, and yet more evidence of why Tom Cruise (playing Vincent) should leave the business. Charles Taylor even wrote an entire essay examining Tom Cruise's career and exactly why he is such an incredibly mediocre actor. I had never seen anything quite like it before. Well, I remember that Pauline Kael, a major influence on Taylor's tastes and insights into film, wrote a piece dressing down Stanley Kramer. But I guess I thought that Kramer really deserved it.

I like Tom Cruise. I like his boyish stupidity and I like his plasticity. And I like his consciousness of his boyish stupidity and plasticity and how this lends him a unique sense of vulnerability instead of developing into a sense of humor about himself. I liked him in Magnolia, I liked him in Eyes Wide Shut, and I liked him here. I think Tom Cruise can be terrific when used properly. I guess you can't really connect with him. He's not really a robot, he's more like a Martian; you just can't really detect where he's coming from. In contrast, you connect with Jamie Foxx who is excellent in the film, but excellent in a way that you know ninety-nine percent of the population will be sympathetic towards. Tom Cruise is then well cast as the foil of the piece, geeky in a way that comes in right angles to all other screen geeks. I suppose in an objective sense Foxx is the better actor, but Cruise seems to have the potential to become a cult personality. Hands off America, this boy is ours.