What do Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi and Michael Mann’s Collateral, both opening this week, have in common? Judging by what some of my colleagues have been saying, they’re both effective action movies directed by talented genre specialists. But I would argue that this description applies only to Collateral.
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Mann, by contrast, betrays no such alienation from genre conventions. Collateral is a film that could have been made 50 years ago; it’s not hard to imagine a taut little black-and-white version of the story, which concerns a cabdriver named Max (Jamie Foxx) who’s forced at gunpoint to chauffeur a contract killer called Vincent (Tom Cruise) around Los Angeles as he tries to bump off five grand jury witnesses about to testify against a cartel of drug traffickers. Max, we discover, has dreams of establishing his own limo service, while Vincent is the product of a harsh institutional upbringing. If all this sounds familiar, it’s supposed to—even though Mann and screenwriter Stuart Beattie are skillful enough to make it seem relatively fresh and new. At the beginning of the film they deftly set up an incipient love interest between Max and one of his customers, a federal prosecutor (Jada Pinkett Smith); later they work her character back into the plot in a way that doesn’t seem unduly implausible.
The best thing Mann brings to his picture is a strong sense of time and place. The plot of Collateral unfolds in a single night, and Mann’s feeling for Los Angeles, always acute, gains in power and density as the killer and his captive driver move from the airport to downtown, then from Koreatown to South Union to Fountain to a jazz club in Leimert Park. In the wake of the first murder, Mann begins crosscutting to the investigations of a cop (Mark Ruffalo) in a way that complicates and intensifies the film’s meshing with the cityscape.
His latest, Zatoichi(2003), is a new chapter in one of the longest-running and most successful action franchises in Japanese cinema and as such was virtually destined to be a commercial success. It was in fact a monster hit in Japan and has done quite well in various foreign markets. Miramax, banking on the insulated character of the American audience, has just released it theatrically in the U.S. even though it’s already out on DVD and video in much of the rest of the world. They’ve also seen fit to encumber it with a clumsy new title, The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi.
Directed and written by Takeshi Kitano
With “Beat” Takeshi [Kitano], Tadanobu Asano, and Michiyo Ookusu
Collateral ★★★ (A must-see)
Directed by Michael Mann
Written by Stuart Beattie
With Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, and Jada Pinkett Smith
