sensationalgirl-2011

Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, and Jada Pinkett Smith all rise to the occasion in Collateral, and together they transcend their previous appearances on film. Mark Ruffalo gives a good performance as the cop who knows everything is not what it seems.

The soundtrack is also excellent, with a mixture of popular music and ambient tracks perfectly-timed and synced to the story... tribal drumbeats during the chase scenes, haunting rock ballads at pivotal moments, and one track that reminded this viewer of the scene at the other end of Tom Cruise's career, when he drives his father's Porsche out of the garage in "Risky Business" to the accompaniment of a thumping synth track. A bizarre side-note, I know.

As the movie builds to a climax, the police are hunting for Max, believing he is the one on a killing spree, and Vincent stalks his final victim in a blacked-out high-rise office to a backdrop of the brilliant LA skyline, reflected in multiplicity by the office's dozens of glass cubicles.

There are a few minor plot points which didn't sufficiently suspend my disbelief (like when Max agrees to take Vincent the vicious hit-man to see his Mother in the hospital), but overall this is a fantastic movie.

We're all used to seeing Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie in dramatic roles - Finding Neverland, Public Enemies, The Changeling, A Mighty Heart... and it's so easy to forget that they can be funny. But they are, both of them. Johnny shines, as he always does. Angelina Jolie looks glorious, and when she smiles, the screen lights up. They don't have chemistry, critics say. Oh yes, they do, I say. More importantly, they seem to be enjoying themselves.

Johnny's Frank is delightful, touching and slightly mysterious. He has endless room to play around, and makes Frank memorable, and lovely, as only Johnny can. Angelina's role is more limiting, but she still makes it fresh and - yes - deeply amusing, parodying both herself and the genre in general. Watching her saunter around on her high heels, one can't help but recall what James Bond used to be like. This isn't Wanted or Salt: she has far more to do here than look cryptic and shoot people, and she does it very well.

Add to that the utterly magnificent Paul Bettany, Timothy Dalton, a few stereotypically dim Russian gangsters (they speak actual Russian, for once, and their funniest lines aren't subtitled) and Rufus Sewell, and there's no way you can go wrong.

Yes, there's a twist at the end - a twist that seemed to annoy most people. But does that take away from the film? No! It adds to it, because it's just so obvious, and natural, that it's all the funnier for it.

It stars Angelina Jolie as a CIA agent who is exposed as a Russian sleeper agent by a Russian defector. Whether she is one or not, her bosses (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Liev Schreiber) decide to keep her under wraps. She'll have none of that, though, as she fears for the safety of her spider expert husband. So basically, like Bourne, it's about a defecting agent running from her employers while simultaneously trying to foil the bad guys. The film does have a couple of semi-clever twists, but it also contains a metric ton of stupidity. There's no real set-up for Jolie being some kind of Bourne-like superwoman, yet as soon as the action sequences start she's either MacGuiver or Jackie Chan. Weighing in at about 95 pounds (seriously, Angie, eat a burger) she's able to beat the everloving crap out of every trained CIA, FBI or Secret Service agent who gets in her way. The filmmaking is reminiscent of Bourne, but, unlike Bourne, the choreography is confusing and implausible. Very little of the plot makes any sense, from the reason for the initial exposure to Jolie's motivations to the final sequence. Any moderate examination reveals the film to make no sense whatsoever.