Jamie Foxx plays Max, an honest and well-meaning cab driver in Los Angeles who "escapes" to a tropical island every day through a photograph he keeps in his car. He dreams constantly and one day hopes to run his own limousine service. He tells the same story about his business plans to almost everyone he meets -- something we learn that he’s done for years.

Foxx’s Max is really a passive participant in life, a guy who wants to but never does. That all changes when Vincent (Tom Cruise) gets into his cab and convinces him to drive him around for the night for $500. Vincent has five stops to make, and it doesn’t take Max long to realize after the first stop, when a body lands on the roof of his car, that Vincent is a killer and there will be at least four more dead bodies if he takes him to the next four stops. What follows is an intriguing crime thriller that depends as much on the interplay and dialogue between the two main characters as on the action in the scenes -- something we rarely see from Hollywood films these days that are almost entirely formulaic action setups without any plot.

In any other year I don’t believe Collateral would be considered a great movie, which is the way it’s being talked about this year. The fact is: 2004 has been a dismal year for movies, and there have been only a handful worth the full admission price. Collateral is one of them. Add the fact that it stars Tom Cruise (nothing more needs to be said about his drawing power) and is directed by Michael Mann (who never makes anything that’s downright bad and sometimes makes films that are truly great), and you’ve got a winning formula that makes it one of the must-see films of 2004. No wonder everyone thinks it’s great. In the end, though, Collateral isn’t The Insider or Manhunter, my two favorite Mann films. But it is in many ways as good as Heat (without the epic feel, mind you), and it’s certainly a whole lot more exciting than Ali, which was admirable, but fairly boring unless you really want to learn about someone else’s life.

As a technical aside, there’s one more reason that film buffs should see Collateral, besides the fact that it’s a pretty good movie. Mann and his cinematographers shot most of the footage using digital video. While I don’t normally talk about the technical aspects of movies in my reviews, I thought it worthwhile here because, like Robert Rodriguez’s groundbreaking Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Collateral signals another shift in the way films are being made and will be made. (Robert Rodriguez’s Mexico certainly wasn’t the first movie shot digitally, and neither was George Lucas’s much-ballyhooed Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones that came before it. However, Once Upon a Time in Mexico looks so good that I consider it the benchmark for "digital films" and the turning point for the success of digital video on the big screen.)

When I first saw the trailers for Collateral, I could tell by the look of some scenes, particularly those that involved skin tones and rapid movement, that they didn’t use traditional film to make it. It just wasn’t quite right -- at least not "right" in the way we’re used to seeing movies on the screen. It was decidedly "video-y," unlike Rodriguez’s movie that was so warm, rich, vibrant and film-like. If I hadn’t been told Mexico was shot digitally, I likely wouldn’t have known. With Collateral, some of the digital telltale signs are quite easy to see, although, admittedly, they occur in only a handful of scenes. On the other hand, Mann, in an interview describing his crew’s use of digital video, explained how some of the scenes couldn’t have been handled using traditional film (Collateral takes place at night and there are plenty of low-light scenes). Digital was the only way to do it the way he wanted. Obviously, there are some pluses and minuses for each technology. However, with the visual success of Mexico and now the commercial success of Collateral, I suspect that it won’t be long until the majority of films, rather than the minority, are shot using digital-video technology.

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