Collateral

"You have to be on point when you're working with Michael Mann," Jada Pinkett-Smith says at one point during an interview segment on the Collateral DVD. Normally, this would seem like the usual "he/she is so great to work with" kind of thing you find on a DVD but wade through the 2-disc set of Mann's 2004 thriller and you begin to see what she means.

The film -- a marvel of precision, narrative economy, and suggestion -- compresses its events into the night that Vincent (Tom Cruise), a contract killer, first hires and then hijacks the cab driven by Max (Jamie Foxx). The fairly convoluted backstory is not told in flashbacks but in pieces of dialogue or facial expression. The events of this night are all the film is really concerned with and it's one hell of a night.

You can see how thorough Mann's vision is as you go through the extras. The making-of doc details months of training for all the actors on how to fire guns (using live rounds, which Mann points out feel different than firing blanks), how to drive a cab (not only does Jamie Foxx interview and ride along with cabbies, he learns to do racing moves with a Crown Victoria on a track), and how to listen to jazz.

On the commentary, Mann explains how Vincent grew up in Gary, Indiana with an abusive father and developed an ear for jazz. Vincent's father, you see, would drive into south-side Chicago jazz clubs like the Checkerboard lounge and Vincent would hear him rhapsodize about jazz to his friends. None of this is in the film, per se, and yet it is when you hear the inflection in Cruise's voice as he instructs Max in the fine points of listening to jazz (and on the look of regret that briefly crosses Cruise's face after he kills a musician in a club).

Like Stanley Kubrick and Roman Polanski, Mann is a taskmaster visionary who likes to shoot 30, 50, 75 takes of a scene. If you think that's wasteful, watch the brief bits of rehearsal footage included on the bonus features disc and you'll change your mind. As capable as Cruise and Foxx are in the rehearsal footage, their performances there are nothing compared to what you see in the finished film. Maybe it's like jazz -- the basic song structure was there but Mann's working methods brought out the nuances.

Something else that might seem excessive is a brief extra that details a day when Tom Cruise posed as a Fed-Ex man and delivered packages, even stopping to converse with a man in a deli. More than just a stunt, this allowed Cruise to immerse himself in a situation and seem anonymous, which is necessary for the character (and the movie) to work. Any director that watches this DVD is going to feel like a slacker afterwards. This is a guy who will shoot in green screen on a subway so he can control what is outside the windows of the train, who figures out how to tweak the laws of physics so a car will land a certain way in a crash.

That's why you have to bring your A-game working with a director like this and when everybody involved is on that level, what could be an enjoyable B-movie diversion becomes something else: a real work of art. -- Christopher Hyatt