Before you see Tom Cruise riding motorcycles off of cliffs in this summer’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, now is a good time to revisit a smaller scale thriller in which he portrays a character even Ethan Hunt would struggle to take down.
Cruise is known broadly as a heroic figure, playing characters like Hunt or Maverick in Top Gun who are unrelenting in their drive for saving the day.
When Michael Mann, director of Thief and Heat, brought him on for Collateral, audiences did not know they were in for a subversively evil outing from Cruise.
Despite the whiplash of seeing Cruise’s typical charm and Cheshire Cat grin twisted into a purely intimidating force of a character, Collateral is one of his finest films, and deserves much more attention when thinking about Cruise’s best performances.
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