The Tudors:
Series 1 & 2
Just £28.98!
DVD / Blu-ray

Incredible Hulk (2008)
Just £9.98!
DVD / Blu-ray

Priceless
Just £11.98!

Ultimate Gangster Collection
Just £26.24!

Why Donate? News & Views Discussion Forum News Archive Announcements All About Us Email Dom Write 4 DVDfever Competitions Music Charts Chart Archive Cinema: Whats on Cinema Reviews Press Releases TV Issues DVD List R1 DVD Reviews R2 DVD Reviews R3-6 DVD Reviews CD Reviews PS2 Reviews PSP Reviews Xbox Reviews Xbox 360 Reviews Gamecube Revs GBA Reviews PC Reviews Hardware Revs Concert Reviews Video Reviews Comedy Reviews Book Reviews Screenplay Reviews Movie Downloads Interviews TV Shows PSX Reviews N64 Reviews Dreamcast Revs Laserdisc Revs Short Stories DVDs In Brief Right To Reply Why Widescreen? DVD Links Music Links WS Video List WS PAL LD List Me and my Aortic Valve!

Dom Robinson reviews

Distributed by

Paramount

Cert:

Cat.no: PHE 8956

Running time: 105 minutes

Year: 2004

Pressing: 2005

Region(s): 2, PAL n

Chapters: 20 plus extras

Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1

Languages: English, French, German

Subtitles: 24 languages available

Widescreen: 2.35:1

16:9-Enhanced: Yes

Macrovision: Yes

Disc Format: 2*DVD 9

Price: £22.99

Extras: City of Night: The Making of Collateral; Deleted scene with commentary, Director's Commentary, Featurettes: Special Delivery, Shooting on Location, Tom Cruise & Jamie Foxx rehearse, Visual FX: MTA Train

---

Director:

Michael Mann (Ali, Arms and the Man, Collateral, The Few, Heat, The Insider, The Keep, L.A. Takedown, Last of the Mohicans, Manhunter, Miami Vice (2006), Thief)

Producers:

Michael Mann, Julie Richardson and Michael Waxman

Screenplay:

Stuart Beattie

Music:

James Newton Howard

Cast:

Vincent: Tom Cruise
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

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.

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."

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.

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:

• City of Night: The Making of Collateral (41:00): Tom Cruise is shown to be a perfectionist as he learns how to shoot a gun and then do his own fight scenes so it's such a shame he can't combat the inner sense of utter bollocks when he speaks about Scientology. Jamie Foxx learns how to drive a cab by heading off to a race track so he knows how to handle those tight turns you get used to when you become a cabbie, apparently.

  Elsewhere, Jada Pinkett Smith, Michael Mann, Barry Shabaka Henley and Mark Ruffalo all get their say about their parts in the movie and there's on-set footage included from several key scenes.

  This featurette, and all the others except where stated, is in 16:9 with film clips in 16:9, shown as described earlier on in this review.

• Special Delivery (1:09) leads the way for a number of much shorter featurettes, this one being about how Tom Cruise is recognisable everywhere he goes, unlike the intention of his character here, so he dresses up as a FedEx man and attempts to deliver a package without anyone saying, "Hey, it's that Scientology nutball!" :)

• Deleted Scene with commentary (1:57): Presented in anamorphic 2.35:1, I won't say what happens, but it's nothing particular to write home about. Strangely, the director's commentary is not optional here on this scene. You have to have it.

• Shooting on Location (2:33): I won't say which location is featured here as it could spoil the plot, but Michael Mann tells us that as it was a dark scene it was helped by shooting in high-definition video, as most of it was filmed, in order to get detail in such a situation that wouldn't normally be there.

• Tom Cruise & Jamie Foxx rehearse (4:13): This does exactly what it says on the tin and concentrates on key scenes based around the cab journies they make. Occasionally, we get the finished version presented alongside the rehearsal for comparison.

• Visual FX: MTA Train (2:27): The reason for the use of green screen in the final scene, and it's surprisingly clever.

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.

FILM CONTENT PICTURE QUALITY SOUND QUALITY EXTRAS
OVERALL

Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2007.

DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.

PC games reviewed by the editor are on: