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Foxx's performance is a revelation: he is completely convincing, understated, and moves effortlessly through a wide range of emotions and conflicts both comical and severe. If his starring role in the upcoming Ray Charles biopic, Ray, delivers on the promise he shows here, he may earn himself an Academy Award. As he watches Vincent's acrobatic immorality, Max's face shifts between wide-eyed awe, horror, angst, and disgust. He feels trapped, and yet each new challenge influences him, altering his character with such subtlety that we hardly notice. He gets frustrated, flabbergasted, humiliated, indignant, and eventually bold, courageous, and cocky; he's even pushed to the point of taking on a cop with a gun in his hand. By the end of the film, he's a new man.

Jamie Foxx is the unsuspecting cabbie who's in for a long night

But what kind of man has he become? Has Vincent brought out the best in him, or the worst?

The tense interplay between Foxx and Cruise is perfectly pitched and sometimes quite funny. When cops pull over the killer's cab, Vincent warns Max, "Don't let me get cornered. You don't have the trunk space." When Vincent learns that the hijacking has prevented Max from visiting his mother in the hospital, the film swerves into an inspired tangent of tense comedy that features the formidable Irma P. Hall, who out-performs Cruise just the way she outperformed other Ladykillers earlier this year.

Even when he's pushing his way through L.A.'s crowded nightlife, Vincent is all business. Other people are just objects to shove out of the way. Still, the story draws a few of these nocturnal phantoms into the killer's wake.

Mark Ruffalo delivers a stunning turn as an LAPD narcotics cop who picks up the scent—it took me a couple of minutes to recognize him. He takes a poorly scripted, cookie-cutter character and makes him one of the most interesting things in the film. Bruce McGill, who nearly stole the show in The Insider with his explosive courtroom technique, is great here too as an FBI agent laying a net for drug dealers, looking like a compact-model of Donald Sutherland and snarling like a pit bull. Jada Pinkett Smith plays United States Attorney Annie Farrell, Max's first fare of the night. Smith's warmth and subtlety reveals her true charms as an actress, talents that went unemployed in her Matrix-sequels roles.

Tom Cruise is a man on a mission. Stay out of his way.

The other great performance in this film is delivered by director Michael Mann. Collateral allows Mann to indulge all of his signature flourishes: slow cruises through the city by night, with the lights gliding across the shiny surfaces of cars, subways, and helicopters; a gun for every well-dressed tough guy; a couple of chaotic shootouts. Viewers will be frequently reminded of his previous films from Ali to The Insider, from Heat to Manhunter. He loves a screen divided by horizontals—freeways, rooftops, horizons, and a windshield that's cracked in just the right place so Vincent's visage is fragmented. When Max leaves the cab station, he drives into a panoramic mural of the wild, wild west. Like Heat, Collateral is a tone-poem tribute to the City of Angels—the back alleys, off-ramps, and warehouses we rarely see in films.

Still, Collateral is also Mann's most formulaic work since he turned in weekly episodes of Miami Vice. Granted, that's not his fault. Taking a note from Midnight Run, screenwriter Stuart Beattie pairs a wise bad guy and a simple good guy, binds them together, and has the bad guy teaching the good guy to get his life together. In the last act, you can feel the tires suddenly sinking into the ruts of a routine action flick, spoiling the fluidity, spontaneity, and grace of all that has come before. Finally, the film swerves into a tailspin of clichés culminating in a confrontation that plays like a feeble echo of Heat's last-act pathos. Coincidences pile up on all sides. People we thought we were meeting by chance early in the film suddenly show up in Vincent's plans. You have to wonder if Mann will play a slow-jazz version of "It's a Small World" over the end credits.

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