In Collateral, Jamie Foxx stars as Max, a cab driver in the hellish sprawl of Los Angeles. Max, as we quickly learn, has big dreams, namely a limousine company so plush and cool that, as he puts it, "people won't want to get out to catch their flights home." The receiving end of this pitch is a woman named Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith), whom Max picks up, and who flirts with him all the way downtown. Max impresses her with his DOT-like memory of swift traffic routes, she hands him her business card, he promises to call--and then moments after she has sauntered away, there is a menacing tap on the passenger window.

The menace is a hit man named Vincent (Tom Cruise), who has arrived in L.A. just that afternoon. Determined, unemotional, and void of morality, Vincent is a human shark, and this being a Michael Mann film, fashion helps hammer this point home; wrapped in gray from his hair to his suit, all Vincent is missing is a threatening dorsal fin--a fin Max's impeccably clean taxi handily provides (in the form of a rooftop advertisement). Max doesn't know it yet, but he's in for a long night: Vincent needs to be shuttled around the city to make five messy appointments before dawn. The offer for Max's service is $600; the hidden gratuity, unfortunately, will be a parting shot through Max's skull.

As premises go, this one ain't bad. In bleaker hands, it could have even made for an inspired black comedy: a cabbie unaware, as he idles at the curb, that his fare is disposing of would-be federal witnesses upstairs--the Robert Altman of The Long Goodbye would have had a field day. Michael Mann, however, has never been interested in comedy (Band of the Hand notwithstanding), and moments after Vincent and Max arrive at their first appointment, a body crashes onto the cab. Vincent's jig is up; the plummeting corpse was a bad mistake, and now he's forced to improvise. His driver needs to become his hostage.

So off Vincent and Max go, the first victim stashed safely in the trunk, Max steering his battered cab through a nighttime L.A. that only Michael Mann can create. The director's chosen format this go-around is high-definition video--an odd choice for such a visual filmmaker, but, as it turns out, a good one. Awash in Mann's standard grays and blues and occasional shocks of white light, the streets of L.A. have a strange feel in Collateral, cold but still somehow vibrant; cheery colors are limited to Max's cab, some random advertising, and, for a while, a glorious dusk--the rest remains moody and, due to the limitations of digital technology, grainy. The result of this scheme is a city that feels mysterious and damp with menace, feelings only enhanced by the lack of all the standard L.A. landmarks. It is a new city, a different city, a lonely expanse for lonely souls--4 million neighbors, 466 square miles, and not a friend anywhere.

As polished and pleasant as all this scenery is (and as good as both Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx are), Collateral nonetheless fails, both as a thriller and as yet another entry into Michael Mann's brooding-men oeuvre. What may have been intended as a thinking man's thriller--patient, observant, character-driven--is thoroughly derailed by a surprising source: Mann's inability to shoot action. How does the man behind Heat's stunning block-by-block shootout top himself? The answer, evidently, is that he doesn't even try, for the brief fits of violence found in Collateral are shockingly inert. One specific sequence, in which Vincent storms a crowded club in search of one of his targets, is particularly egregious, as Mann appears to have lost all sense of both pacing and geometry; clunky and sluggish, what should have been the film's centerpiece (hundreds of extras, killers, cops, heavily armed henchmen) instead becomes a primer for Bad Filmmaking 101. Mann attempts to lean too heavily on realism this time around, and as a consequence the mayhem is far too chaotic and fails to engage. This is a thriller, after all--a certain amount of flair (normally Mann's calling card) wouldn't kill anybody.

And Collateral is, indeed, just a thriller--despite the gloomy tones, and despite Mann's aforementioned brooding-man tendencies. The plot is pure pulp--trash in the Phone Booth vein--and it should have been nurtured and groomed as such, not saddled with foreshadowing coyotes (which Max and Vincent muse over) or lectures on genocide in Rwanda (which Vincent offers). Watching Collateral, you can see the straining--the pulled muscles and tendons--as Mann tries to force the film into something bigger than it should be. He wants the picture to transcend its genre, its gimmick; he wants it to transcend Tom Cruise, but that's precisely what shouldn't happen. There is nothing shameful in a well-executed thriller (just ask David Fincher), and given Mann's inability to develop, or even care about, his female characters, the genre should have fit him like the snuggest of sweaters.

In fact, if Mann's real aim with Collateral was for it to be yet another examination of the complexities and conflicts within XY chromosome pairs (packaged, with a nod toward the bottom line, with the biggest movie star in the world), he shouldn't have included Jada Pinkett Smith's character at all. She may serve the expected purpose in the story--an object in peril--but her presence here feels even more superfluous than it normally would. Women, as usual, are a bother. Mann is only interested in the brooding being passed back and forth in the cab--interrupted, occasionally, by loud bangs.

brad@thestranger.com