Collateral: A-

Michael Mann seriously loves the pumping and grinding of a good dance scene. It was there in the opening scene of last year's midnight-cool Miami Vice as well as the opening shots of Ali. In Collateral, Mann's 2004 midnight-cooler thriller, he doesn't dissapoint; the director sets a scene of such cleverly decadent dance-club noise that it'll leave you in a mile-high state of excitement. The scene itself - in which Vincent (Tom Cruise), a contract killer who has hired Max (Jamie Foxx) to drive him around all night to his various "stops", goes racing through a packed club to take out his next victim - isn't seemingly that special. It features no gigantic explosions and there isn't a cheeky Bruce Willis line within a mile of the place and yet the action on screen is tossed-of with the perfect gesture: something half-way between nonsense and dread, insanity and thrills.

Such is the blue-print for the entire movie; the picture snakes along with terse, malevolent energy until suddenly...bam! bullets, blood, and the adrenaline levels go flying. As action-thrillers go, I'd say that's a pretty potent formula and Tom Cruise, his steely lethal sarcasms in full regale, makes the perfect bruise-black center for it.

Strangely enough though the film starts not with a bang, but with a whimper; or rather, instead of some gun shots, there are red lights. Everything starts with Max, a "temporary cab driver", going about his day-job...or rather, night-job. You see, Max prefers the late hours of Los Angeles to the scorching heat. It is this preference that leads him to pick up two passengers: Vincent and Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith), both of whom serve as vital plot markers but, more importantly, as two more jagged, true-talking characters in the fast-flying world envisioned by writer Stuart Beattie.

Though I have spoiled, in some way or another, a major turn in the film's twisty propulsive narrative I have said very little about the events that actually transpire in the film. There is little to say without ruining for each viewer the unique experience of watching Michael Mann work his craft - the hard-boiled, fragmentary, poetic dialogue, the moody camera work, the creeping scores. Mann is in such control of his craft that in each scene, from those early flitatious moments to the cat-and-mouse show-downs of the last frames, Collateral sails along to a truly mesmerizing beat; so much so in fact that I forgot I should be critiquing the film and simply sat watching, unable to take my eyes away.

I get the nattering feeling that the entire emotional core of the movie lies in Vincent but if that is the price I have to pay to be privy to the enjoyably off-kilter chemistry of Foxx and Crusie, so be it. The two of them - captor and captive, good guy and bad guy, straight-laced and off-the-handle - make up the majority of Collateral and are together its thrilling center of off-balance gravity. I acknowledge that there are some thinly-veiled contrivances involved in such an obvious plot idea ("the cabbie and the assasin went into a bar...") but if the result is such as this, a movie that moves as calmly and cooly as the L.A. night air, then who am I to complain?