The Librarian of Celaeno writes at Substack Collateral and the Remembrance of Death:
Directed by Mann and released in 2004, Collateral was one of a number of neo-noir films set in Los Angeles since the early 1990s, the first of which was The Two Jakes (1990) the sequel to 1974’s Chinatown. Neo-noir as a genre refers to films featuring themes of paranoia, alienation, vice, loneliness, and moral ambiguity, wherein the protagonists often have to make difficult ethical choices with no clear right path forward in a corrupt or indifferent world. It’s never nihilistic as such; morality does exist in the neo-noir universe, but good characters are often forced into situations where they have to do something ostensibly bad to prevent some greater evil. They generally also feature raw and realistic violence and incorporate unconventional camerawork to emphasize the fraying of mental and moral stability.
As always, his work is worth reading.
I watched Collateral last year, and the only intelligent thing I said about it was:
At any rate, the plot: Foxx plays a cab driver who picks up a blond Cruise at a courthouse after dropping off a prosecutor planning for a big case. Cruise has a couple of stops to have people sign papers for a real estate deal, so he engages the cab driver to drive him to all the stops. But, at the first stop, a body flies out the window and lands on the cab, and Max (the cab driver) learns Vincent (Cruise) is an assassin on a mission to… well, it develops, take out witnesses and the prosecutor in a case targeting one of his clients, or related organized crime figures.
Along the way, Max and Vincent develop a bit of a rapport. Vincent shakes Max out of a bit of a habitual, rote existence dreaming of better things (owning a limo company) and gets him to man up and demonstrate some confidence–one scene has Max going into a nightclub, pretending to be Vincent. But, in the end, the rapport is false, and Max has to protect his mother (whom he visited in the hospital with Vincent) and the pretty prosecutor who rode in Vincent’s cab earlier.
So the film has some depth in exploring the relationship between the men and how it evolves, mostly in Max drawing strength and confidence from the psychopath’s influence and ultimate his testing.
Which I suppose is okay as this is a blog and not a la-de-dah Substack.