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"It started like any other night."

It’s hard not to like Tom Cruise. Despite the many terrible movies he’s made over the years, and his devotion to the dubious cult of Scientology, there’s no denying his acting chops and magnetic on-screen presence. And lately he hasn’t put a foot wrong. Minority Report, his first film with his new best mate Steven Spielberg, was a cracking science fiction thriller. His next movie, The Last Samurai, was even better. Maybe the best he’s ever made. A wildly exciting East meets West adventure from Glory director Ed Zwick, it raised expectations for all future Cruise projects. The good news is that Collateral, Cruise’s long-awaited Michael Mann collaboration, is every bit as good as we were hoping it would be.

Unlike the majority of Hollywood stars, afraid to damage their nice guy reputations by playing bad guys, Cruise seems positively eager to explore his dark side, his role as slick hitman Vincent in Collateral proof of his growing range and absolute fearlessness as an actor. Not that the movie’s success is all down to him. Essentially a two-hander, Cruise shares this cracking thriller with rising star Jamie Foxx, whose uncannily accurate performance as Ray Charles in biopic ‘Ray’, earned him an Academy Award nomination. Besides the pedigree acting talent on display, Collateral also benefits from a director who, unlike the majority of his peers, seems to be improving with age. Now in his sixties, Michael Mann is a filmmaker at the peak of his abilities. Heat was great and The Insider’s a classic, but it’s Collateral that Mann now has to top. Which’ll be tough, because it’s a tightly scripted and relentlessly paced piece of work, exciting and intense with a fiendish sense of humour. And have we mentioned yet that the acting’s pretty good as well?

The story unfolds over a single, event-packed night in soulless L.A. Cabbie Max (Foxx) is a decent bloke with great big dreams, though he clearly lacks the gumption to make them come true. Then into his cab steps Vincent (Cruise), sharp of suit and brain and eager for Max to shepherd him from meeting to meeting throughout the night. It doesn’t take long, however, for Max to realise that Vincent’s business is murder. Sitting quietly in his cab at their very first stop, he freaks when a body appears as if by magic, slamming down hard and bloody on his roof. "He fell on the cab!" yells Max. "I think he’s dead!" Vincent barely reacts. "Good guess." Max twigs. "You… you killed him?" "No," replies Vincent. "I shot him. The bullets and the fall killed him."

A stone cold killer with a penchant for jazz and a punishing schedule of hits to attend to, Vincent insists on Max’s further co-operation for the rest of the evening, which only gets wilder and more dangerous. This is classic cat-and-mouse entertainment, a titanic battle of wills between a bad man with deadly skills and irresistible self-confidence and a good man so far out of his depth he might drown at any minute.

Don’t expect to leave the edge of your seat. Don’t even expect to blink. You won’t want to miss a word or a single stylish shot of this compelling, exhilarating thriller. Highly recommended to rent.

American filmmaker Michael Mann cut his teeth writing and later directing episodes of Police Woman and Starsky and Hutch on television before creating the hugely successful series Miami Vice. Turning to film he has specialised in tales of law and order, his credits including Thief (1981), Manhunter (1986) and Heat (1995). But he has proved equally adept in other genres, earning acclaim for The Last of the Mohicans (1992), The Insider (1999) and Ali (2001). Collateral stars Tom Cruise as a hitman who travels to LA to execute five key figures in a forthcoming trial. Taxi driver Max (Jamie Foxx) realises too late that his unassuming fare is taking him on his most dangerous journey yet.

Did you ever doubt that Collateral would work with Tom Cruise playing such a villainous role?

“ There are a whole range of parts and emotions and dynamics that I haven’t seen Tom do that I know he could do. So it was a very exciting prospect for me, to have him play the kind of character he hadn’t played before. My favourite performances of Tom’s are Magnolia, Jerry Maguire, Rain Man, there’s so much potential in him playing more diverse characters. And I like to cast against type, to take people onto different frontiers. ”

Did you imagine a back story for his character, Vincent?

“ He probably would have been in Special Forces, probably would have had a very unsuccessful career in the military because he may have been good, but would have been insubordinate to authority. Then maybe six or seven years ago he moved into the private sector, hired by drug trafficking cartels, that sort of thing. If you look closely at him there are a number of scars on his face and hands, things that you don’t immediately notice. There’s a certain ‘rough trade in a good suit’ quality about him. ”

The diverse characters of Vincent and Max clearly drew you into a very human action film then?

“ I like dimensional characters, and with Vincent I wanted to see the human being on the inside. Glimpsing that doesn’t condone his actions, what he does is sociopathic and socially dysfunctional. He’s a psychopath. Yet you still see the human side to the man because in our story he starts to crack. The first glimpse of that is the remorse that he has after he kills one of his victims. He doesn’t hesitate, and he’s right back on the job afterwards, but you see something – a fracture – and that’s how I wanted to get to know the human being he might have been had his life taken a different course. I used that strategy to reveal the double nature of the man. ”

During one of the climactic chases Tom falls off an office chair as he’s pursuing his quarry at one point didn’t he. Did he hurt himself?

“ No, those are the kind of anomalous things that just happen. I love those moments. I’ve never had anyone hurt on a film, or killed but when Vincent is standing by the doors of the train, the door closes and bangs into him. These are like the accidents that happen in life that, which make things feel more real. So I value them. ”

Max [Jamie Foxx] is a very normal character thrust into abnormal circumstances driving this hitman around. At one point he has a gun but doesn’t even know how to handle it. Was that a particular decision of yours?

“ Absolutely, Max is a middle-class cab driver from Ladera Heights, a middle-class section of LA, so he’s never really seen violence in his life. He’s got the impulse to do things like ask Annie [Jada Pinkett Smith] for her phone number, but he can’t quite bring himself to do it. There’s a real potent guy there but he’s very inhibited. That’s his character. So of course he doesn’t know how to handle a gun. ”

After making the film it seems that Jamie Foxx could get hired as a cab driver if the acting doesn’t work out.

“ We gave him racing car driving instruction in a taxi cab out at Willow Springs Racetrack. He did a great job. When you drive a cab you learn how to do all kinds of things that get you to your destination that little bit earlier. And Max spends 12 hours a day driving a cab, five days a week, and has done for 12 years so Jamie needed to know how a Ford Crown Victoria handles when you’re driving it. ”

The cityscape of LA almost becomes another character in the film, doesn’t it?

“ When you drive through the city at night you really sense the allure of Los Angeles. It puts you in these strong moods. I’m always looking for that as a filmmaker, because that mood is never static. It became very liberating in those driving sequences, because instead of playing out a scene in one location we got to play it against a whole mile of the city. That’s how LA is perceived, in a way. On the move. ”

Can you recall your own cab ride from Hell?

“ I was going to my own wedding rehearsal in New York. The cab driver said, ‘where are you going?’, and I said, ‘The Plaza Hotel’, so he said, ‘why’s that’, ‘for a rehearsal for my wedding’, and he said, ‘you’re gonna go and get married?’. He turned the meter off and said ‘let’s go for a ride in Central Park, let me tell you about marriage’ and he proceeded to give me this big lecture about why I shouldn’t go through with it! ”

Michael Mann Filmography