1 It's a buddy-cop movie where the buddies aren't cops and they wind up trying to kill each other. Imagine Collateral as written by Shane Black. A wisecracking hitman comes to town. He hops in a cab, driven by a lovable family-man cab driver. It's his last day on the job, probably. He's gonna go work for his brother-in-law, probably. The hitman and the cabbie roll around town, getting into car chases, becoming friends, beating the Russian mob. There's the notion that the hitman might kill the cabbie; instead, he leaves the cabbie with enough cash to finally start his limo company. You can see this version of Collateral right there in Collateral. There's a delightful scene early on, when Max's boss is loudly abusing him via radio, and Vincent steps in to teach Max an important lesson about telling your boss to shove it. There's an anti-authority, middle-finger-to-the-grown-ups vibe to that scene that runs throughout the whole buddy-cop genre: Nuts to those crusty old police chiefs! Except that Collateral takes the buddy genre to its logical extreme. These two characters don't get along. They learn from each other, and, in learning, they become worse enemies than ever. Imagine if Lethal Weapon ended with Mel Gibson, finally going full-crazy, and Danny Glover has to put him down.

2 It’s a horror movie. Vincent is a ghost, or perhaps a Golem. Is Michael Mann a horror director? Manhunter has some of the scariest moments in the history of the serial-killer genre. His second film, The Keep, is a full-blown horror movie. It's the story of a monster set loose by a man who thinks he controls the monster; but unleashing the creature has unintended consequences. Isn't that the story of Collateral, too? Vincent, we learn, was hired by crime lord Javier Bardem to kill five people; by the end of the night, many more people are dead. Is Vincent a monster—a supernatural being, metaphorically if not actually? He has no past that we can understand. (He tells us two different origin stories—and it's never clear if one is true, or if they're both lies.) There's a moment late in the movie—the beginning of the best scene in Collateral, although there are at least 10 others tied for second–when Annie tries to flee the darkened office, and just as she gets to the door, we can see Vincent's shadow on the other side of the glass. It's an unsubtle moment, and so classical it recalls the shadow crossing the sleeping girl's face in I Walked With a Zombie. Too subtle for you? About a minute earlier, when Cruise goes full-Shining with an axe and a power line. Still too subtle for you? Watch this shot, and tell me that that Collateral isn't one of Tom Cruise's two best vampire movies. Collateral is a strenuously "realistic" movie—"realistic" in quotes because a devotion to realism is a central aspect of Mann's preparation. But the final act of Collateral goes Full Dreamlike. Vincent, covered in blood, suddenly develops the ability to sniff his prey, to know exactly which train Max and Annie are on. And there is the moment when Vincent dies, and in Cruise's impeccable tilt, you don't even see any life leave him. He just stops, like a robot out of batteries.

3 It's a pre-apocalyptic film about how all modernity—technology, society, laws—is just a cover, barely repressing the animal within. There are two running visual motifs in Collateral, one of which seems to be an accident and one of which Mann talks about constantly on the commentary. The latter is the trees: The specific way that the palm trees linger in the background of Collateral. Even though it's the dead of night, you can still see their silhouettes against an eerie evening light—another visual unique to High-Definition video. The other running motif has to do with light, too. If you were to construct a Collateral drinking game, a key aspect would be the appearances of planes. They're up there, constantly, in the sky: Their lights twinkling, taunting Max with the possibility of escape, or maybe reminding Vincent that he only has to linger in this city he despises for a few hours more. There's a scene in the movie that encapsulates this read on the movie. It is cheesy; it is on-the-nose. It features the voice of Chris Cornell, and worse, the voice of Chris Cornell from his Audioslave period. There is a metaphorical animal, a coyote crossing the road: This is all in the lead-up to the Korean Nightclub scene, a sequence that is by far the best-known scene in Collateral. It's a bad omen, but it's also bizarrely optimistic: a reminder that none of this really matters, that Los Angeles is still a desert underneath all the palm trees lit up black by the High-Def video. On the soundtrack, Cornell sings, "I can tell you why people die alone." In the hospital Max visits every day in Los Angeles, his mother appears to be in the process of eternally dying. Vincent kills people and feels nothing; ultimately, Vincent winds up dead. The Symbolic Coyote is probably the least troubled character in the film.

4 It’s a superhero movie. Max and Vincent are opposite numbers in every way: The wealthy-looking sociopath in a sharp suit, the everyguy loser taxi-driver with a heart of gold. It's the Unbreakable rule of the archnemesis: complementary antagonists, symmetrically opposed to each other. (Vincent loves to improvise; Max always needs to have a plan.) In order to stop Vincent, Max needs to become a hero. And what very specific gesture does he make when he starts to become a hero—when he steps outside of his comfort zone, when he becomes something larger than himself? So Clark Kent becomes Superman; so Max becomes something larger than himself. Of course, in that scene, Max isn't really himself; he's impersonating Vincent, and the knowledge of playing someone other than himself gives him the ability to talk down to murderous crime lords.

5 It's a detective story where the detective winds up dead and the mystery never gets solved. The first two-thirds of Collateral spends a lot of time setting up Mark Ruffalo, playing a cop who is slowly trying to piece together why people keep on winding up dead. You could almost look at Ruffalo's part of Collateral as occupying a completely different movie—an interior spinoff, taking place at the exact same moment. Ruffalo is a Mann protagonist, too. He's an undercover cop, like Sonny Crockett. He doesn't get along with his superiors, like everybody. For some reason that you can't really explain, Mann introduces Ruffalo in a shot that perfectly mirrors a previous shot of Cruise: The two men, walking, slightly out-of-focus, downtown Los Angeles behind them. (Perhaps it's a visual cue to one of Mann's favorite themes: They're not so different, cop and criminal?) Ruffalo's cop—Ray Fanning, his name is—goes to meet an informant. He's not there—and we know that said informant is currently taking up space in Max's trunk. Fanning's partner tells him to drop it. He won't, of course. (When do movie detectives ever drop anything?) He stays on the case. He finds the other men that Vincent killed... and he finds a connection. They're all witnesses in a grand-jury trial: the grand jury wants to indict evil crime lord Javier Bardem. Tomorrow. (That's the case that Annie is working on; she's Vincent's final target. It's a plot twist that's simultaneously too cute and absolutely essential.) Fanning and the LAPD go to meet with the FBI, who've been on Javier Bardem's case for weeks. Guess what: the FBI takes the case away from Fanning, because the Die Hard rule of action movies says the FBI is never helpful and always wrong. Fanning's partner again says to drop it: Go home, get some sleep, let the feds handle this. Fanning doesn't. He follows the feds to Koreatown. There's a shootout. He saves Max. You're thinking that we're closing in on the endgame, that Ruffalo is going to have some kind of showdown with Vincent. Hell, you're at least thinking that Ruffalo is going to do something. Instead this happens: Fanning gets shot by Vincent. He never even sees the man he's been chasing all night. We don't even get the courtesy of a last real moment with Ruffalo; the final shot of his character is his body in the doorway, hand falling to the side. Structurally, this is a shock to the system: one of the lead characters killed, without a minimum of bombast. And here's what makes this read on Collateral even more depressing. We're told that the four men Vincent kills are all witnesses in a trial to convict Javier Bardem's character. Even though we know that, the specifics remain hilariously unclear. Drugs are involved—but what sort of bizarre criminal enterprise would encapsulate the owner of a jazz club, a wealthy attorney, a low-level drug dealer and a high-level Korean gangster? (It's like one of those French New Wave fantasies of American-style crime, a conspiratorial enterprise so elaborate that it might as well be the government.) The final victim is Annie; she doesn't die. But look who else does: Oh, that's right: Every single witness. Is there even still a case? There's not even any evidence to link crime lord Javier Bardem with all the murders committed by Vincent—no moment when, say, Annie and Max catch Vincent confessing on tape. Bardem is only in one scene. His name is Felix Reyes-Torrena. Everything that happens in Collateral happens because of him. He never stands up, not once. He's surrounded by bodyguards. In a busy nightclub, he has every table reserved for himself. He is, quite simply, the most interesting man in the world. And it seems very likely that, at the end of Collateral, he defeats the combined powers of the LAPD, the Justice Department, the FBI, and whatever cab service Max works for. He wins. And he doesn't even entirely know why. He never meets Vincent, the man who works for him, or Fanning, the man who is working most directly on stopping his reign of terror.

6 It’s a movie about the American Dream. Stop me if you've heard this before. Normal middle-class man has a dream for his future, future arrives, dream does not. It's Death of a Salesman, it's On the Waterfront—hell, it's The Great Gatsby. Max is a great cab driver—two people notice how good he is in the first reel—but he wants to be so much more, and so he feels like so much less. Enter Vincent, an avatar of contemporary success. He's a man in a suit who travels for a living; he's George Clooney in Up in the Air, literally killing people instead of just ending their career. Vincent smells like success, looks like a man who's lived abroad for awhile. He's in town for a real estate deal, he says. Imagine a different Collateral, where Max never learns Vincent's true nature, where he assumes that Vincent is just one more businessman with a hazily-defined job, making money by taking it out of somebody else's pocket. All around them, other characters who serve as avatars for curiously American tragedy: the wealthy people who built their wealth on crime, on drugs. Recall Gatsby, a bootlegger—and isn't bootlegging just drug dealing with more old-timey hats? But neither of them are happy, neither Vincent nor Max. Vincent, a wealthy man, is all alone in a cold universe of his creation. Max, not a wealthy man, is the same. They tell each other as much. They see each other clearly; the only thing that saves Max, ultimately, is that he also sees himself clearly: Can I push this Gatsby thing a little further? Can we agree that Mann is a careful director, a man who's unlikely to pick a detail at random—even a Bacardi advertisement that appears throughout the entire movie, on top of Max's cab, gradually becoming battered and ultimately destroyed as the night goes on? Is it worth noticing those eyes—and is it worth remembering that the Eyes of T.J. Eckleburg were also from a battered old advertisement?

7 It's a Tom Cruise movie, but also an Anti-Tom Cruise movie. Wild assertion about Tom Cruise: No famous movie actor of the last 30 years has a more painstakingly well-manicured star persona, and no famous movie actor of the last 30 years is more willing to put that persona in the service of a project that twists the essential iconography in weird, nefarious, subversive ways. Top Gun chiseled the Cruise mythology in granite: the cocky grin, the '80s-era reconfiguration of "heroism" as a thrill-drunk hotshot affectation, the weird paradox that vintage Cruise is a perfect man whose inner turmoil centralizes on the concept that he might be too perfect. From there it's a hop-skip to The Color of Money and Days of Thunder, to A Few Good Men and The Firm and Mission: Impossible. It's become a common trope to say that there are no more movie stars—a complete fallacy that Jennifer Lawrence disproves every time she shuts down Twitter with a breath. But it is accurate to say that the '90s were the last time that the business of Hollywood depended on stars, and not brand names or digital effects or whatever pretzel-capitalist logic leads to a world where several people who went to business school think Snow White Minus Snow White is something that can make money. And the '90s were also the last time that stars could completely control their image. Today's stars are generally looser, interacting via social media with at least the pretense of genuine self-revelation. (There was no Ice Bucket Challenge in the '90s.) No one had a tighter control over his own image than Cruise—which means that there is an essential elemental appeal whenever Cruise took a role that purposefully played with that image. Four years after essaying the role of Reagan Military Superhuman in Top Gun, Cruise was a paralyzed Vietnam vet protesting the Republican National Convention in Born on the Fourth of July. Between The Firm and Mission: Impossible, Cruise played a blond, decadent, ravenous immortal in Interview with the Vampire—not one of his best roles but maybe his most fascinating. Then came Jerry Maguire in 1996—not one of his most fascinating roles, but maybe his best. Jerry Maguire would be an insane outlier in today's Hollywood: An R-rated midlife-crisis dromcom, a movie that is simultaneously about a proto-Apatovian male friendship and a realistically complicated romance. And Cruise-as-Jerry is the last time that Cruise ever played a relatively normal guy in recognizably normal circumstances. Jerry's a high-flying sports agent at the start of the movie, engaged to a super-hot business queen. By the end, he's walking around a suburban baseball field with his Zellweger-ian wife and adorable adopted son. Always a nostalgist at heart, Cameron Crowe turns Jerry Maguire into a sidelong monument to a regular-type life. (Remember that line in Heat about barbeques and ballgames?) You wonder if Vincent in Collateral is the one guy on the planet who thinks Jerry Maguire is a horror movie. In 1999, Cruise was in Eyes Wide Shut and Magnolia, two auteurist curiosities that played on different sides of his persona. Eyes Wide Shut takes Cruise's boyish good looks and turns him into the proverbial babe in the woods, an innocent adrift in an erotic fairy tale. Magnolia takes Cruise's macho swagger, twists it into misogyny, and then reveals the misogyny as the shrill overcompensation of a sad little boy trying to impress daddy or maybe kill daddy. In Collateral, Cruise-as-Vincent says his father "Hated everything I did. Got drunk, beat me up. In and out of foster homes, that kinda thing." Then he says he killed his father when he was 12. Then he laughs—the Cruise laugh, the usual charm turned sour—and says his father died of liver disease. (Think of that scene, then think about what Cruise has said about his own father.) Minority Report and War of the Worlds are both great entertainments—and even better if you hit "stop" like two minutes before the ending. Minority Report imagines Cruise as workaholic supercop whose hyper-effective action-hero status is explicitly a distraction, a way to not confront his emotions. In Report, Cruise is a mourning father; in Worlds, he's the absent dad. (You could describe War of the Worlds as a movie about the incredible lengths a man will go to foist his children off onto his ex-wife.) Collateral combines elements of all the other movies. But what makes Collateral the ultimate Tom Cruise movie is that it's also the one movie on his resumé where he is a flat-out villain—an irredeemable demonic force. Even Lestat in Interview with the Vampire had human yearnings—he murdered out of gluttony. Vincent murders because it's his job. He's so good at his job that he can fly into Los Angeles and kill five people without needing to book a hotel room. It's interesting to listen to the Collateral commentary track and hear Mann talk about Vincent's backstory, which is left completely unexplored in the movie. You can't even really trust that story about Vincent's father—any more than you can trust the story about another drunk abusive father who inspired another gleeful sociopath. (ASIDE: One way to understand the cinema of Christopher Nolan is that it's set in a world where the only movies are Michael Mann movies—and you imagine the Joker watching Collateral and laughing. END OF ASIDE.) Mann, always over-prepared, has a whole Vincent origin story. He describes a Special Forces background; he asserts that Vincent's suit was custom-tailored in Kowloon. What's weird about this is that Mann clearly views Vincent as a real person. And any other actor could have made Vincent a real person, or "realistic." You could see Mann casting someone purposefully nondescript, a tough guy who can actually fade into the background: Jason Clarke, or Stephen Lang, or Tom Sizemore, or Ciarán Hinds, or chubby-phase Russell Crowe, to only use examples from Mann's own repertory. In Heat, Mann cast Robert De Niro as a quiet professional in a gray suit, and the central pleasure of that performance is how De Niro can play a man in the constant state of disappearing. He puts Cruise in a gray suit, too, but the effect is completely different. De Niro is a chameleon; Cruise is a supernova. Cruise's gray hair glows neon-bright in the LA darkness. Cruise's gray stubble never looks real, but it looks better than real: It looks unearthly. Fifty-two now, Cruise has never really played old. Like, compare his career to Russell Crowe, who was mid-30s playing mid-50s in Mann's The Insider. (Hell, Jennifer Lawrence in American Hustle feels older than Ethan Hunt ever does.) He's not old in Collateral, precisely, which makes his brutal cynicism feel almost anti-human. Another actor could have made Vincent a more believable character, but no other actor could have made Vincent such a force. This is Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West; this is Denzel Washington in Training Day; this is the moment in Mission: Impossible II where the bad guy puts on Tom Cruise's face, except this time it's not a mask.

8 It's a videogame. There's a shot that pops up constantly in Mann's later work: a handheld camera held just behind a character's shoulder. It's simultaneously intimate and off-putting: You can't see their face, but you can see what they're looking at. Remember those shots of the downtown skyline—that quality of being so near and yet so far, of seeing millions of lives in the distance but not being able to connect with any of them? This shot accomplishes the same thing. It's Mann's way of putting us up close with his characters, but it also keeps them at a distance. (Mann heroes almost always want to keep their distance: from their friends, from their women. That's why the strongest connections they ever make are with people they'll probably kill.) It's a third-person shot, really, resembling the typical camera angle in a Grand Theft Auto or a Gears of War: It's videogame language on screen. At one point, Mann literalizes this, with a shot from over Cruise's shoulder that stares down the barrel of his gun. You could look at Collateral as a series of videogame levels, each with their own sub-boss and their own unique soundtrack. When the film begins, there are a series of shots from a god's-eye-view, following the car as it navigates the streets. Of course it's just a coincidence that this resembles precisely the god's-eye-view of the original Grand Theft Auto. Of course it is. In the final act of Collateral, Max has to save his princess, in her tower in the sky. It's the fairy-tale logic of a Super Mario game, complete with a shot of the princess' castle where, if you look closely, you can see her on one floor and the Final Boss two floors down: A perfect shot, at once realistic and dream-logical.

9 It's a depiction of Michael Mann's internal creative struggle. When you hear that Collateral is a movie about a successful hitman and a loser cabbie—and you hear that one of them is a meticulous planner and the other one prefers to improvise—you would assume that the hitman is the meticulous one, right? Quite the opposite. Vincent doesn't know anything about the men he's killing, besides their face and their geographic location. With the exception of Annie, he doesn't check out the locations ahead of time. At least one of his marks is surrounded by bodyguards. Vincent improvises, he adapts to the environment. Point him in the right direction, he'll take care of the rest. Jesus, he hires a taxi driver to drive him between assassinations. He's the jazz hitman. Michael Mann has made 10 feature films in three decades. (An eleventh, the techno-thriller Blackhat, is coming out next year.) Mann takes his time. He's a fastidious, maybe even an obsessive filmmaker. He can be a cold director—and so many of the directors he influenced are very cold, visual stylists who don't seem to know or care how to work with actors. Some people love the movie version of Miami Vice, but to me, it feels like the most expensive storyboard ever, with the actors as placeholders. (There's a famous story about Mann banishing the color red from the Miami Vice movie, which is a cool story, but it doesn't explain why Miami Vice can't make you believe for even just one second that Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx want to be in the same room.) You wonder if Mann sometimes spends too much time preparing. You wonder if he worries about that. You wonder if that's why he was one of the first great filmmakers to never really leave television behind. Maybe there's something about the grind that appeals to him, that forces him to keep a schedule. You can't overthink when there's an episode due. You have to make the best of it, improve, adapt to the environment, Darwin, s--- happens, I Ching whatever man, we gotta roll with it. Miami Vice, Crime Story, Robbery Homicide Division. Not all of Mann's work was successful but all of it is interesting, and much of it was said to be "cinematic," which is what we used to say about good television before it was conventional wisdom that television was more interesting than movies. So Collateral sits at a strange nexus point in Mann's TV and film work. You can look at it as a more low-key Heat. It's like that Al Pacino-Robert De Niro coffee scene expanded to movie length, as if Heat was a whole TV series and that coffee-table scene was a bottle episode. Or you can look at Collateral, as the series finale to a Crime Story-style serialized drama: the explosive climax to a season-long arc, involving the feds and a massive criminal enterprise and Jada Pinkett Smith as a crusading attorney and Tom Cruise as a malevolent assassin with a trademark two-in-the-chest-one-in-the-head kill pattern. And it's the nexus for Mann, because Vincent and Max are the two sides of his personality. Max the meticulous, Vincent the visceral. Max, who would carefully plot out every shot of the nightclub scene (shot on film!) so that you could follow every plane of action, so you know exactly where the cop and the hitman and the cabbie and the feds and the henchmen and the other feds are in relation to each other. Vincent, who would look through the monitor at a stunt gone wrong and see one of his favorite parts of the movie: Vincent is supposed to throw the chair through the window, jump behind it, and keep running. Cruise (or maybe it's a stuntman) jumped a little too early, or threw the chair with uncanny perfection, landed on the chair mid-jump, got up, and kept running. On the commentary track, Mann says that was unplanned, and you can feel how much he enjoys it; how he tries so hard to create onscreen worlds out of the hope, but only because he paradoxically wants something genuinely spontaneous to happen within those worlds. Preparation and Improvisation, Max and Vincent.

10 It's a comedy.

11 It's a film about trying to figure out who two men really are. The most obvious, but also the easiest to overlook. It's striking to listen to the commentary track and hear Mann throw out biographical details for Vincent and Max. In the movie, we learn barely anything about them. Mann knows exactly which province in Thailand Vincent lives in most of the year–"a Buddhist country where people leave everyone else alone"–and he idly mentions that Max has three older siblings. (He also refers to Max as "petit bourgeois," lest you think I'm the only one who sounds pretentious when describing Collateral). Part of what makes Collateral such an addictively rewatchable movie—a film you can catch on television and keep watching–is how, with each episode of their journey, the two men at the center radically shift their relationship. Sometimes Vincent helps Max, sometimes they learn from each other, sometimes they're almost friends, and sometimes they're the worst enemies. As a result, it's possible to watch Collateral several different ways. Is it a movie about Max, an everyguy who experiences something profound? Is it a movie about Vincent, a professional at work? Should we read Vincent as a sociopath—as a man incapable of feelings? Mann doesn't seem to think so—and you can see Max hit a nerve when he talks about Vincent's past, the reference to an orphanage, the implication that Vincent has feelings that are buried far, far down. Why does Vincent tell Max to bring flowers when they visit his sick mother? Doesn't Max enjoy pretending to be Vincent a little bit too much? In the end, there's a shootout on the train. Max kills Vincent—a lucky shot. Max fires blindly through a doorway. Vincent tries his two-in-the-chest-one-in-the-head shot... and happens to hit the metallic part of the door. Max improvised, Vincent didn't: A neat twist. Max stares at Vincent. He tells him the next station isn't too far away. But Vincent gets the last word: "Guy gets on the subway and dies. Think anybody'll notice?" Does he win Collateral? He sure thinks he does. But then there's this shot of Jamie Foxx, pulling off Max's glasses for only the second time in the movie, and staring at the man he just killed. I've talked a lot about Tom Cruise, and he undeniably has the more fun role: Big speeches, big lines, cool action-guy moves. But Foxx is just as good with the tougher role: The guy who has to carry all the real-person weight of the movie, to provide an everyguy counter-balance to his chewier costar. (Weirdly, he's the Tom-Cruise-in-Rain-Man role.) And I just love that last look at Vincent so much. What's he thinking there? Is he sad? Is he confused? Is he a little bit frustrated—did he want that conversation to keep going, want to throw Vincent's nihilism back in his face? There's an angle where you look at that shot and remember Shane Black's Collateral—where that's the face Jamie Foxx would make at the end of the buddy-cop version, "Oh Vincent, there you go again." There's an angle where you look at that face and wonder if that's a man staring at the only person who ever saw him clearly. He leaves Vincent on the train—and isn't that a way of honoring a dying man's final request? So much of Collateral is just faces, and so much of Collateral is two men's faces. They talk, they think, they look at Symbolic Coyotes, they argue, and all of this plays across their eyes. There's a scene where Vincent holds a gun on Max, and Max realizes he has the upper end or just decides he doesn't care, and the look on Jamie Foxx's face is ecstatic with kamikaze madness: There's a version of Collateral that's just faces—a modern-day version of The Passion of Joan of Arc. That's not too far from what we have here. You can imagine a fine director shooting Collateral and trying to make the cab scenes look "cool"—wild camera angles, computer-assisted camera movements, shots that circle around the car. Mann just shoots the faces; in the background, the lights of Los Angeles begin to look purposefully abstract: