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May 11 2011 
DVDfever co uk
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Dom Robinson reviewsCollateral: Special EditionDistributed by
Producers:
Screenplay:
Music:
Cast:
Max: Jamie Foxx Annie: Jada Pinkett Smith Detective Fanning: Mark Ruffalo Detective Weidner: Peter Berg Pedrosa: Bruce McGill Ida: Irma P Hall Daniel: Barry Shabaka Henley Felix: Javier Bardem Airport Man: Jason Statham
Los Angeles - a city of 17 million people where nobody knows your name and driving out there each and every night is Max (Jamie Foxx, bottom-right), a cabbie who has high dreams of what he'd like to do and consistently maintains that this job is just temporary despite having done it for the last 12 years. His first memorable fare of the evening comes in the form of lawyer Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith), who gives him her card and leads him to his next one, Vincent (Tom Cruise), who pays him to drive for the night, which is against regulations but a hefty tip persuades our dreamer. However, things go horrendously out of control for Max as the night pads out while his latest fare stays super-cool. Vincent wants to make five stops and then get to the airport, but the first stop results in a man landing on the roof of Max's car, shaking the cabbie to hell and back. Bemused, he asks Vincent, "You killed him?!", to which the calm reply comes, "No, I shot him... the bullets and the fall killed him."
Peter Berg is in this briefly as Fanning's partner, ever-sceptical because the FBI like to take any credit established by the LAPD and claim it for themselves, so he doesn't see the need to bother. Cruise is his usual ever-reliable self, thus proving that even if he does have the wacky beliefs of a nutter off-screen, he *keeps* them off-screen. Foxx also pulls a good turn, his character going through a change which echoes along the lines of The Smith's Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" with, "Seen the luck I've had, can make a good man turn bad..." Finally, and to its great credit, Collateral does have a satisfying ending, which is something most films rarely succeed in attaining. N.B. The title of the film comes and goes quickly in a line spoken by Max as it's the point where he realises there's no escape from his position with Vincent and that he has to see this through. That makes him Vincent's "collateral" in case anything goes wrong.
When it comes to the fantastic anamorphic picture with no problems visible, the 2.35:1 framing is very tight so this will not sit well when cropped to 16:9 on TV, particularly the cab interior scenes with Vincent in the back on the left-hand side of the screen and Max in the front on the right. Part of the film is shot with the Super 35 process, however, and the 'making of' shows that scenes shot that way lend to a far more comfortable 16:9 print than, say, those in the cab which are destroyed in the cropping to 16:9. It appears that the scenes that will suffer are those shot on high-definition video, as discussed later, and these account for around 85% of the film's footage according to the director. There's not a massive amount of split-surround sound going on in the Dolby Digital 5.1 soundmix, but this is made up for in spades with some fantastic use of the 2.35:1 visuals.
Firstly, the supplemental material has more languages for subtitles than you can shake a stick at. There's 24 here, including English. The inclusion of English might sound obvious but there are some distributors who are happy to add subtitles for every language under the sun on some DVDs... apart from English, for no apparent reason. All of the extras appear on disc 2, apart from Michael Mann's Director's Commentary, for obvious reasons. What's less obvious is why each of the following isn't chaptered, despite lasting some length:
So, almost a full hour of footage in the above which is a good set of extras, but a lot of this stuff is watch-once-only and not the kind of thing that you'll go back to and, as such, it should all have fitted on the first disc had that not been so crammed with subtitles and audio languages. As for the DVD menus, they feature film clips and music that repeats after a short time but retains the theme of the film. There are subtitles in 24 languages so it's unlikely anyone will miss out, and the 20 chapters should have been increased as 20 isn't enough for a 2-hour film and the first one is ridiculously long at 12:47.
Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2007.
As of April 2009, Blu-rays and DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TH-37PX80B 37" Plasma TV with a Sony BDP-1500 Blu-ray player and played through a Yamaha DSP-AX820 amplifier. PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
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The first thing you notice about Collateral
is Tom Cruise's hair (right) - A bouffant grey affair that you expect Simon Cowell will end up with
in another 10 years, providing he's not dining out on Grecian 2000.
Over the night, their relationship, for want of a better word, takes many dramatic turns, few of which
are predictable, but what is inevitable is that the police get wind of these 'disturbances', the first
one being Detective Fanning (Mark Ruffalo) who gets on their trail because the first victim is
one of his informants.
