Collateral 2004

A private user reviewed Collateral (2004)

Not Really a Review

I'm beginning to see, for the first time, the seams of hastily sewn product. And not just in movies, but in other major visual media. Not to say that contemplation of, say, Big Bank commercials is a new art. I don't want to put people off with trite polemics. Concerning the film at hand, once we get over the legitimacy imbalance of juxtaposing Cruise on screen with the soulful Foxx and Jada, we become much more intertwined with the scene-by-scene unraveling of the story - and to this reviewer's eye, it doesn't impress. Not as a movie or as an occasion for friends or even one lone soldier to complicitly sit by and watch this thing unfold disjointedly for two hours. I'm not even talking about flow. One could argue that this movie jives, at a certain level. I just think that a sentient being will catch whiplash from the herky-jerky relation to reality that the unfolding of these scenes exemplifies. The initial back-seat cab banter is immaculate viewing (Jada/Jamie). The rest is offensive, or at least unnerving. I'm gonna have to backtrack through my catalogue of tried and trues to find out if I haven't pulled back the curtain on the entire "dudes in front of cameras" thing.