Back in January, film critics Manuela Lazic and Adam Nayman began working together on a long list that initially had more than 100 titles on it, in order to sum up something interesting—if not definitive—about the past quarter century of film. Narrowing things down was hard. They spread out their picks as evenly as they could over this 25-year period and also across a variety of styles, and for the rest of 2025, they will be dissecting one movie per month. They’re not writing to convince each other or to have an ongoing Siskel-and-Ebert-style thumb war. Instead, they’re hoping to team up and explore a group of resonant movies. We’re also hoping that you’ll read—and watch—along.
Manuela Lazic: Back in 2004, they didn’t yet know that hit men don’t exist. Nevertheless, Michael Mann’s Collateral has been influential, I think specifically so for Richard Linklater’s hit contract killer film, Hit Man, and for its star, Glen Powell, Tom Cruise’s chosen heir and Maverick wingman. (When will we stop talking about Cruise? And when will I stop talking about Powell?)
Anyway: I wouldn’t be surprised if Powell and Linklater were inspired by Vincent, the contract killer at the center of Collateral, when writing their own deconstructed contract killer. The physical blandness (gray hair, gray suit, small—I mean medium—build), the congenital amorality, the microdosed irony—he’s a guy leaning into an archetype, to the point of almost being in costume. Everything about him is concealed, but there’s no identity to hide. In Hit Man, Powell’s shape-shifting fake sicario (“hit man” in Spanish, ICYMI) adopts the right face for each job, and his sense of humor is both charming and necessary to make it through the moral dilemmas he faces. Slyly channeling various murderer stereotypes, he’s like a one-man highlight reel. Too bad Cruise as Vincent wasn’t one of his many outfits. Guess it could have ruined the friendship.
Of course, Collateral’s reach extends far beyond Hit Man; it’s been imprinted onto American cinema at large. This is especially true in terms of Mann’s use of digital cinematography, which made the most of a then-new technology. The way that the film’s cinematographers, Paul Cameron and Dion Beebe, capture the nuances of light and dark at nighttime in the city is ubiquitous now, though rarely handled in such a precise and creative way. Collateral’s many aerial shots still feel few and far between compared to what’s in your average urban action film today, where drones whizz about effortlessly and with little motivation (the exception is Michael Bay’s Ambulance, where they swarm like angry bees, which is objectively great). What strikes me most when rewatching Collateral today, however, is how much heart there is in the film, and how that tenderness is put into sharp relief thanks to this digital look. Vincent is a cold-blooded killer and a control freak, someone who makes himself unnoticeable and then criticizes Los Angeles for being a city where nobody knows your name (the urban legend that his surname is actually Collateral has sadly never been confirmed). On the other hand, his driver for the night, Max (Jamie Foxx), is indecisive and perhaps a little cowardly, but he knows right from wrong, and he sees through Vincent’s cool facade.
Looking Back at the Century in Cinema
This dichotomy is pure Mann: As in his previous L.A. story Heat, he focuses on men trapped in their circumstances, hardened by their lives and occupations yet helplessly sensitive to human connection, however scared they may be of it. His films have moments of grace, like the suspended seconds when a coyote crosses the street in front of Max’s taxicab. In the final set piece, in which Vince is chasing Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith) in her darkened office building, all we see are, quite literally, bodies in space, the glittery L.A. skyline in all its abstract beauty in the background and the characters reduced to half-seen shadows. That visual style speaks to Mann’s concern with dehumanization and difficult connection, and besides, it just looks extremely cool. The fluid camera flies around when tension is high but also seizes those glimpses of grace, like so many butterflies, before they vanish behind a glass building.
Notoriously, though, Mann’s sensitivity can lead him straight to the cheese board, and his music choices in Collateral are perhaps a little too sincere. But time is luck, and I think that the film’s early 2000s score not only anchors it in its era and makes it an interesting document of that time but also contributes to the film’s power. It is much easier to be cool and cynical like Vince than to admit you’re hoping against hope, dreaming of the Maldives like Max. Likewise, it’s less risky to put sleek techno music in your hit man movie than to make Groove Armada spell out your themes over a wordless driving montage.
That shoot-out in Annie’s office feels like the direct source of inspiration for a similar sequence in John Wick: Chapter 4, but I also feel some of the same sincerity in that franchise, even if the moral dilemma that comes with murder isn’t as present. That profound sentimentality, I think, explains the success of the John Wick series, since it’s so cruelly lacking from most of the action genre today. At their best, action movies allow for bigger philosophical questions to arise. As it progresses and the bodies pile up, Collateral becomes an exploration of the meaning of life itself. If we’re all just specks in the galaxy, then why not drive your car into the air and be done with it?
Do you feel the influence of Mann’s embrace of digital film in the movies that have followed Collateral? And what do you make of his taking action cinema seriously enough to make it existential?
Adam Nayman: These are good questions, but first, I’d like to take a moment to discuss the “cheese board” of Collateral’s soundtrack, because it really is a choice spread. Yes, Groove Armada is in the house, but so is Paul Oakenfold’s unstoppable “Ready Steady Go,” which plays during Vincent’s assassination of Peter Lim (Inmo Yuong) on the crowded dance floor of Koreatown’s Club Fever—a kinetic mini-masterpiece that goes muzzle flash for muzzle flash with Heat’s downtown shoot-out. But to truly plumb the musical metaphysics of Mann—he of the Tangerine Dreamy needle drops and Phil Collins superfandom—you have to note his deep and abiding love for the short-lived, riff-heavy Rage-Against-the-Machine-plus-Chris-Cornell supergroup Audioslave.
“A synthesized rock-like product that emits no heat” was Pitchfork’s assessment of Audioslave’s self-titled 2002 debut. Tell that to Mann, who put the band’s music in Collateral and Miami Vice. The magical sequence with the coyote crossing the road is basically a compressed music video for the brooding, mystical “Shadow on the Sun,” which finds Cornell contemplating what it means to “live without a soul.” “If you can find that piece of music which evokes the central emotion of one of your characters, some pivotal crisis where he or she must rouse themselves from despair and manifest something very aggressive within his or her own mind—this becomes the piece of music for that moment,” said Mann in a 2012 interview with the Directors Guild of America Quarterly. “‘Shadow on the Sun’ nailed that moment for me. It became an indelible part of planning, sustaining, and executing that scene.”
Planning, sustaining, and—double entendre alert—executing: An allegorical reading of Collateral à la James Caan’s heroically process-oriented safe breaker in Thief is right there for the taking. Except that I would argue that where Thief is clearly a deeply personal debut—an earnest parable of labor and exploitation with an authentically Marxist edge—there is a strange detachment in Collateral, a slickness that renders the idea of directorial self-portraiture fascinating from a slightly less exalted angle. Basically, the movie plays like a job for hire. An exceptionally well-done job, to be sure, hardly anonymous hackwork. Nobody else would have made Collateral in this particular way, with such an eager, experimental embrace of new technology or with such eccentric, ephemeral emphases on urban alienation (“A guy gets on the Metro here and dies”). Collateral is mostly enjoyable and even beautiful in places; we have coyotes here in the east end of Toronto, and their eyes don’t gleam half as brightly as they do through Mann’s digital video lens.
But considering the endless script revisions that ultimately rendered Stuart Beattie’s original treatment nearly unrecognizable—and sidelined his idea to cast Robert De Niro as Max in homage to Taxi Driver—it seems fair to say that Collateral feels like the skilful sum of its own compromises. It’s Mann in problem-solving mode, coming off a pair of superb and politicized box office flops (The Insider and Ali) and pushing through—and sometimes against—his extremely commercial material in ways that, more than anything, evoke Vincent’s own proud yet increasingly bedraggled virtuosity. When Mann is at his best—as in Heat or The Insider—his movies are so scrupulously controlled that you can barely breathe; for me, after Collateral leaves Club Fever and Max crashes the cab, the tension between visual poetry and prosaic plot points slackens and the film starts sucking wind.
As for taking action cinema seriously enough to make it existential: Mann is nothing if not serious, and he wears his influences on his designer sleeves. He famously had Cruise watch Jean-Pierre Melville’s cold-blooded, Criterion-ratified 1967 thriller, Le Samouraï, as preparation for playing Vincent, and there’s more than a little Alain Delon in his performance: not so in much the line readings as in the smooth, frictionless body language. What Cruise doesn’t quite muster up is the sense of loneliness driving Delon in Le Samouraï—or, for that matter, the melancholy of De Niro’s work as Neil McCauley in Heat, which was similarly directed in Melville’s debt.
It’s telling that Cruise’s best moment is the one in which Vincent smirkingly sells Max on a sob story about his brutal childhood, only to undercut his own facetious mythmaking. Vincent isn’t a tragic figure; any skeletons in his closet are literal. The novelty of seeing Cruise play a sociopath was real, but my flowers are for Foxx, whose soulful, Oscar-nominated performance rewards the intense, sometimes invasive scrutiny of Mann’s squashed and/or oblong dashcam compositions. It’s a cliché to say that certain actors disappear into their roles, yet one of the reasons Collateral works is because Foxx sublimates so much of his natural charisma—and physical strength—to play a character who doesn’t live just inside his car but inside his own head. Or maybe it’s better to say that, in Collateral, these two spaces become aligned: perception as a form of highway hypnosis. “Various people are asleep,” says Bruce McGill’s tetchy, ineffectual FBI agent at one point. “Various people are not. They come and go in cars, pickups, taxis …” There have been several crucial 21st-century movies set largely inside moving vehicles: I’d cite Holy Motors, Cosmopolis, and Tom Hardy’s one-man show in Locke. Do you think Collateral gets better metaphorical mileage?
Lazic: First, I’d like to go back to what you said about Vince and his psychopathy—no doubt the guy has issues, but I wouldn’t say his skeletons are only literal. When Max bitterly tells him, “The standard parts that are supposed to be there in people, in you aren’t,” Cruise gives Vincent a touch of humanity. His foundations are clearly, if briefly, shaken. This is the same bruised Cruise from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) and Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky (2001), in an era when the actor was more willing to make himself ugly and psychologically vulnerable, as opposed to endangering only his physical self through perilous stunts. I do miss that version of him.
As for riding in cars with boys, I have a lot of time for Cosmopolis’s credible detachment, as though that car were a spaceship inhabited by an alien struggling to fit in and terrified of an outside world that he himself, as a super-capitalist, has created. It’s interesting that David Cronenberg went from seeing cars as outside, obscure objects of desire and transcendence in his intense and perverse Crash (1996) to shells in which one can hide oneself and better penetrate the world 16 years later—as though these vehicles truly became extensions of us, not only through post-traumatic surgery that turns us into bionic beings, but even more by a total immersion in the automatized world. Perhaps this is why I particularly love John Carpenter’s Christine (1983): A car back then may have been sexually appealing and could crush you to death, but she was still just a car, not part of us—a much more reassuring proposition, all things considered.
In Collateral, this shift to a symbiotic relationship with technology hasn’t happened yet: Max doesn’t have a GPS he can rely on to guide him, and it is precisely this necessary reliance on the human factor that allows for his flirtation with Annie. If his car is a shell, as in Cosmopolis, it is nevertheless a human one, where connection with others can and does occur. The way Max finds himself having to let go of control (“You no longer have the cleanest cab in La-La Land. You gotta live with that,” Vincent suggests after he’s accidentally dropped a corpse on top of it) reminds me of an altogether different 21st-century movie about driving your brain around. In Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film Paterson, the aptly named Adam Driver plays a poet who also sits behind the wheel of a bus every day and who faces a crisis when his vehicle breaks down. His way of life is purposefully vintage: He doesn’t have a phone, which makes it all the more difficult to deal with this situation. He has also never published, let alone digitized, his poems, making them and himself particularly vulnerable to the passing of time and the hazards of everyday life. Yet Jarmusch isn’t implying that embracing modernity is the way forward; rather, the film mourns a more humane, concrete way of life and celebrates all the small ways in which it can still be pursued. After all, it is often while driving his bus and observing his neighborhood that Paterson gets ideas for his poetry. This film, like most of Collateral, was shot digitally, yet both use that tool to transcendent effect, reaching beyond the cold indifference of city life to tell stories about finding yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile and wondering, “Well, how did I get here?”
I wonder whether Cruise’s habitual, almost ritualistic self-sacrifice to bless us with real stunts in each and every one of his new Mission: Impossible movies is his own way of trying to let go of control within a highly structured and digital environment. We do call them star vehicles, no? It is true that his determination to forgo digital effects in favor of the real thing (and the occasional broken bone) does bring tangibility to a genre that has been invaded by green screens and, recently, the much worse uncanniness of AI. Yet, paradoxically, his sharing on social media of the behind-the-scenes footage of these sequences, however impressive, has deadened their effect, at least for me. Although the images themselves are palpable, embodied, as real as they can get, by the time they’ve gone through the über-dematerialized, fracturing medium of social media, that realness has been tainted. This is perhaps one of the great changes that has affected movies in the past 25 years: Cinema, with its focus and containment, doesn’t jeopardize images the way social networks do, yet cinema is now dependent on social media to reach audiences.
That said, do you think Vincent Collateral (I know this is not the character’s name) would be on LinkedIn today?
Nayman: I’d like to think that Vincent would avoid job websites entirely. Back in 2004, it was still possible to be an analog man in a digital world, and his black valise, crammed with paper files, aligns him with an earlier generation of pavement-pounding professionals. (Related: “Yo, homie, is that my briefcase?” is one of the best line readings of Cruise’s career, not least of all because it sounds like the sort of thing he would probably say in real life if somebody took his briefcase.) I like what you said about Cruise’s relationship to realism, which is, of course, wonderfully double-edged; we recognize that it’s Tom Cruise doing all of those stunts in Mission: Impossible and Top Gun without necessarily getting closer to some sense of who he actually is. If I were Vincent, this might be the cue for a monologue about the true nature of being and nothingness and whether we can truly ever know other people or ourselves. Because I’m not, I’ll say that Cruise’s mix of distant, almost intergalactic remoteness and his impulses as a people pleaser is what makes him such a compelling movie star—a human special effect. (His upcoming collaboration with Alejandro González Iñárritu should be spectacular—a psychogenic fugue of self-importance played out in long takes. Could you imagine if Cruise had been in The Revenant instead of Leo? He would have actually fought a bear.)
You also mentioned Adam Driver, which made me think, of course, of Ferrari, which came and went a couple of years ago with less fanfare than you’d expect for one of Mann’s movies—a by-product, perhaps, of how it privileged historical realism over anything resembling pulp fiction. Ferrari barely made $50 million worldwide, continuing the commercial decline of Mann’s post-Collateral output. I mention this not to equate dollar signs with quality—of course—or to suggest that late Mann is somehow unworthy, but to note that, in retrospect, Collateral seems like the turning point at which a filmmaker who’d earned a certain amount of creative latitude by appealing to a popular audience became rebranded as a kind of acquired taste. Mann is the anointed auteur of contemporary social networks; the vague, amorphous (and largely rhetorical) entity known as “film Twitter” may or may not exist, but if it does, Mann is its once and future philosopher king. The wild imbroglio last year over a stray tweet about Miami Vice testifies to how his work has become a lightning rod for different currents of contemporary cinephilia, for skeptics as well as true believers.
If I had to try to put a finger on why, I think it comes back to the question of technology and the fact that Mann was an early, spectacular adopter of digital video in a moment when the format was mainly associated with thrifty indie dramas or found-footage horror. Even if Blackhat is the only Mann film explicitly about the internet, he symbolically threw his lot in with the extremely online set awhile ago. If he ever ends up making Heat 2, it’ll be interesting to see how he translates the novel’s blend of old-school procedural and Blackhat-style keyboard warfare. In the book, Chris Shiherlis (RIP, Val) reflects ruefully on his time as a bank robber, likening himself to a “19th-century bandito”; he tells himself that he’d rather live in “the electric now.” Twenty years later, that’s still how Collateral feels to me: a gorgeous and glitchy thriller plugged into the electric now.
