Reviews

Michael Mann's 'Collateral' has lots going for it including lush visuals and an atmosphere of a surreal-looking L.A. and its diverse topography.

A beguiling, cold-blooded assassin psychologically losing control while his counterpart, a mild cabbie, becomes emboldened- is an intriguing concept. Dialogue, acting, and pacing were all involving.

But it would be nice if there were a halfway plausible narrative. And that ending was telegraphed early on in the movie. Then a horde of coincidences and plot holes conspired to undermine it all.

SPOILERS AHEAD What are the chances that on a night a cabbie had two random fares in the largest city in the U.S., one would be an assassin and the other one of his targets?

It was ludicrous when victim #1 fell out of his 4th floor apartment. After all, what competent hit man would shoot his target right in front of an open window? (Yet Vincent, the hit man, is presumably the ultimate in the profession). Sure enough, the victim then goes splat right atop Max's cab- gee, what are the odds?

Later, Vincent decides to take time out for a friendly visit of Max's mother in the hospital- normal protocol for an assassin. Who should they meet in the elevator? Why the cop sniffing out their trail! Max then decides to run out of the room leaving poor Mama briefly with the conscienceless, amoral assassin Max had just seen murder five people (three targets plus two intruders).Well, Max and Mama weren't that close, anyway.

And how does a quaking cab driver convince a vicious drug overlord that he is really the hit man he's just hired? Because drug czars are really idiots, don't you know?

Vincent stresses that he be anonymous- yet what happens in the big night club shootout? While guns are blazing away, scores of people see Vincent hacking his way Terminator-style toward target #4, a big Korean with a large coterie of bodyguards. Amid all the chaos, the Korean never moves from his seat in the booth. He awaits his fate like a seal pup in front of a shark. I guess he was really into the music. And how does Vincent calmly walk by L.A. police and the Feds, into the street unchallenged after having just caused so much destruction? (He even plugs a cop on the way out).

Just prior to the night club shootout, there are police cars and helicopters tracking the taxi cab through crowded L.A. streets. A few minutes later, after the shootout, the streets are suddenly deserted. Huh? Oh I get it, that was a mood change.

After Max crashes the cab, Vincent's laptop is conveniently open revealing who target #5 is. Anyone could see in the foreshadowing at the beginning of the film, who that was going to be.

I probably could have forgiven the plot contrivances, if the denouement hadn't been so klutzy. We've got Max desperately trying to reach the damsel in distress on his cell phone, which is breaking up because the battery is low (only seen that one about a hundred times). And of course, Max finds a spot atop a parking structure which can still transmit a signal, which naturally gives him a view of our heroine's office in a federal building and also a view of the heroine and our assassin. Even though it's about 3 a.m. at this point in the movie, our heroine (the prosecuting attorney) is still getting prepared for her case that very morning (oh yeah). And our assassin takes no notice that there would be cameras all over a federal building. But that's OK because we've already noticed that our terminator is none too bright about details.

Why Vincent needs to whack the attorney is a puzzle in itself, since all the prosecution witnesses have been taken out. And why he takes time to locate the power source for the 16th floor and knock out the lights, who knows? He could have just walked in there and killed her, but no, at this point of the story, with the claustrophobic effect of the taxi cab ride over, we need to try and fabricate suspense. And when Vincent finally gets his gun trained on her, instead of drilling her quickly like the marksman he was with the other victims, he simply stands there for 5 or 6 seconds until our cabbie enters the scene, and they can have a couple lines of witty repartee.

Later, after jumping on the back of a moving subway train, (the back door is open, of course) our rivals move toward their final confrontation. Then we're supposed to believe that Max, who doesn't even know how to brandish a gun, accidentally kills Vincent with a miraculous shot through a window. Bravo, Max.

And of course, the last line in the film has Vincent muttering a repeated line of psychobabble he had made reference to earlier in a cab scene- to the effect that if a man is shot dead in a subway, will anybody notice? Well, not that hit-man anyway.

Since Mann had made it a big point in the film for Vincent to talk about man's insignificance in the universe, the movie would have had a much more impactive ending if there had been some sort of final psychological warfare staged between Vincent and Max. Perhaps Vincent could have finished off Annie, walked out and left us wondering what would have gone through Max's mind. Almost anything would have been better than the Hollywood clichéd ending that was presented here, and it's somewhat surprising that a director of Mann's stature and intelligence didn't give us one.

But, hey Mr. Cruise. You looked icy cool with that spiked silver-gray hair and matching suit. A hit man should always be stylin'.

Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, John Cusack. That's a great lineup. Unfortunately, this movie gets buried in illogic. I'll mention just a couple plot holes (out of many).

It's implied that Cusack's character, Nicholas Easter, somehow manages to manipulate himself into the jury pool. Yes, we're informed later on that Easter had studied previous gun control cases and had files of information about them. But that doesn't mean an individual can surreptitiously jiggle the system so that his number somehow comes up.

Hackman's character, Rankin Fitch, is introduced as a jury consultant second to none- he never loses. His antennae are always dead on. In their 'war room' setup, Fitch correctly dismisses jury prospect Easter as being too much of an unknown, too risky. Then, inexplicably, he turns around and throws him in as a potential juror. So the viewer is given the information that Fitch doesn't play hunches- then he plays a hunch. We're given the information that he's the world's greatest jury consultant- then shown that he's easily manipulated. That didn't make sense.

Neither did the proposition that Easter could manipulate his fellow jurors at any turn in the case with a well-timed turn of phrase.

The director even manipulates the audience early on, by showing Easter as initially disappointed about getting a jury duty summons, when we quickly find out he should be elated since he wanted to be on the jury from the get-go.

I could buy into the revenge factor of Easter and Rachel Weisz's character, Marlee. I could buy into the high-tech surveillance and computer equipment that Fitch & company could throw against his adversaries. But no way could I buy into Easter manipulating not only the jury consultant, but the judge (by pretending he didn't want to be there) and the jury.

This doesn't even address the many preposterous events that unfold in the story, any one of which would have been cause for a mistrial in real life. And then, as if the audience wasn't already insulted enough, the story resolves itself with Easter saying he didn't really manipulate the process, because he didn't have to. Yeah, sure. Thanks Nicholas Easter- you didn't need to go through all your machinations. Virtue would have won out anyway, right?

Jury tampering and influencing of judgments are provocative themes for a movie, but here they're way too heavy-handed and sloppily wielded to be believable.

I enjoyed Mystic River on some levels- cinematography, mood, setting, score, character development. I can even go along to some degree with ploys set up to connote a modern-day Shakespearean tragedy.

What I find totally implausible, however, are the numerous contrived coincidences needed to prop up the story- otherwise it falls over like a house of cards.

Katie Markum meets her doom at the hands of her boyfriend's mute brother(Silent Ray) and his buddy, when she randomly encounters them the night before she's supposed to run off with the boyfriend(Brendan). Silent Ray just happens to be playing around that night with a gun that was used in a liquor store robbery years before by Brendan's father. One of the boys takes a pot shot at Katie's vehicle, causing her to drive off the road injured, and when they discover they know the girl- well naturally, she's got to die, otherwise she'd rat them out, they figure.

Coincidentally, Silent Ray and Brendan's father (Just Ray) was killed by Katie's father (Jimmy) years before for ratting him out to the police and Jimmy did a two-year stretch in the pen before coming out and getting his revenge. And Katie just happened to fall in love with Brendan, the young man Jimmy dislikes because he's Just Ray's son.

Now Dave (Jimmy's boyhood friend), also of the neighborhood, just happens to see Katie in a bar just before she's killed (which later sets him up as a suspect). Dave's withdrawn from being molested as a kid, but coincidentally, on the fateful night of Katie's murder, he happens to run into another molester and ends up beating him badly. Oh, the irony.

Naturally, when Dave comes home with blood on his hands and relates the incident to his wife, Celeste, she becomes immediately suspicious when a news report reveals Katie's murder. This was a glaring plot contrivance.

There was no groundwork laid for Celeste's suspicions, never-the-less this being a Shakespearean tragedy, suspicion outweighed the bond they'd formed since childhood and subsequent marriage.

The third boyhood friend (of Jimmy and Dave)- Sean is a Boston detective and even though he rarely sees the guys anymore, he just happens (out of all the detectives in big-city Boston) to draw Katie's homicide case.

We know for this story to come full circle there must be more tragedy to balance the scales. Celeste relates her suspicions to Jimmy who, in turn, kills his friend Dave just before Sean solves Katie's murder.

There were other plot blunders. Even though Sean (and his partner Whitey) do bravura police work to connect Katie's murder to a 20-year-old robbery, we're then supposed to believe modern-day Boston hasn't advanced enough to unravel blood and fiber evidence at Katie's homicide scene and the scene where Dave beat up the molester.

Finally, Annabeth's (Jimmy's wife) speech near the end justifying Dave's murder is absurd- unless of course, you buy into the film as fable. But since it's presented as gritty realism, the scene feels out of place. Also awkward are Sean's phone conversations with his estranged wife who calls him up but says nothing. If this is meant to draw a parallel with the mute Silent Ray, it doesn't make sense.

If you recall Clint Eastwood's 1999 'True Crime', Eastwood plays a self-indulgent reporter who follows a string of clues of an old murder investigation, and is able to save the condemned man in the nick of time. Apparently, Eastwood thought that resolution was too pat and happy.

So in Mystic River, the detectives solve the case just a smidgen too late to keep Jimmy from killing Dave. Here, revenge and violence are deemed honorable emotions indifferent to the suffering of innocent people. If the wrong people die, so what- at least intentions were good.

The anguish worn by most of the lead characters also seems contrived, manipulating the audience into thinking they're watching something meaningful.