The recent Tom Cruise/Jamie Foxx vehicle Collateral looks and feels very much like an episode of the old Miami Vice TV series. That’s not surprising, considering the film was directed by Michael Mann, who executive produced Vice and is widely credited for giving that series its striking visual style. It’s also not a flaw, in my estimation, because Vice is one of my all-time favorite TV shows (I’m eagerly awaiting the DVD release of the first season in January). In many ways, the show was a conventional “buddy-cop” police procedural, but the scripts often displayed a lot more meat than I think most people remember today, and certainly more than was common to most ’80s cop shows. There was also an appealing undercurrent of weirdness in Vice, a sense that this seemingly mundane story of cops vs. drug dealers could spin off into The Twilight Zone at any moment, and I believe that the times when this current was allowed to surface directly influenced the most popular crime shows currently running on TV, the assorted C.S.I. properties, which traffic in weirdness all the time.

Collateral is much like its small-screen cousin in that there’s a lot more going on intellectually than it might seem at first glance, and while Collateral never gets truly weird in the way that Vice sometimes did, it is frequently surprising. And, of course, it’s got that great Vice look, combining the slick beauty of a city at night with the grimy, sweaty horrors of human behavior at its worst. This is a combination that enables us to go from a picture-postcard image of Tom Cruise’s profile framed by towering palm trees and streetlights to a disorienting shoot-out in a jam-packed nightclub.

The plot of the film turns around a common trope of classic film noir, the ordinary Joe who is pulled into a dark realm of murder and compromised morals. The ordinary Joe in this case is a cab driver named Max who has dreams of someday owning his own limo business. Max’s world is turned upside down when he picks up a fare called Vincent, a self-assured businessman who has five stops to make over the next few hours and is willing to pay Max handsomely to be his exclusive driver. Max agrees, thinking he’s struck the jackpot for the evening. But at the first stop he learns just what kind of business Vincent is in, and by then it’s too late for Max to get out of what he’s stepped into.

Although the visual style of Collateral is a major selling point, much of the film’s pleasure comes from the performances of the two leads. Jamie Foxx is a revelation as Max. I’ve only been peripherally aware of him until this film — I vaguely remember him from the old In Living Color series back in the early ’90s, and I know he had his own self-titled show on the WB network, which I don’t recall ever seeing. However, his impeccable performance in this film has made me enough of a fan that I am eagerly looking forward to his take on Ray Charles in the upcoming biopic Ray. He’s that good as Max, so completely inhabiting the role of the working-class Everyman that you forget you’re watching an actor playing a character. You see only Max, the sort of guy we all know and maybe pity just a little, the guy who doesn’t want much from life but can’t manage to attain even his modest ambitions. We watch him unravel over the course of a long night, gradually transforming his fear into resolve. We’ve all seen lots of movies in which the ordinary guy assumes the mantle of hero, but in this one we believe it.

Tom Cruise is equally good as Vincent. I know Cruise has his detractors — in fact, I know several, all of whom claim that every role he plays is basically just Tom Cruise, and who are put off by his somewhat unearthly, just-too-damn-white smile — but I personally like him a lot, and believe that his talent is consistently underrated by critics and the public alike. He has a lot of fun with Vincent by taking his familiar repetoire of mannerisms and twisting them ever so slightly to depict a man who is cool, rational, seductive, and scary as hell, the anti-matter version of Cruise’s usual screen persona.

Vincent and Max spend a lot of time talking in this film, which is why I say there’s more going on than you might think. On the surface, this is just a thriller, but if you pay attention to what these men are saying, you realize that it is instead more of a character study, in particular a study of Max, although Vincent gets his time on the psychologist’s couch, too. Both of these men are flawed and, in their own ways, sympathetic. Getting to know them is a fascinating journey, and the lessons Max learns about putting off your ambitions are ones that really hit home with me.

I’ve read some reviews of the film that focus more on the plot than the characters and find it lacking. In particular, the ending has been criticized as “far-fetched” or “too convenient.” These are charges that were often leveled against Miami Vice, too. I can only say that I disagree with them, as I found the movie to be perfectly satisfying, but if I had to defend against them, I would just say that the plot isn’t really the point, as odd as that sounds when discussing a thriller. The point is the interaction of two men under extreme pressure and what they reveal about themselves as the tension rises. Oh, and did I mention that the movie looks great, too?

As with my review of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, I’m pretty late in posting this (I actually saw Collateral back around the first of September), so if you want to see it on the big screen, your options are limited. In the Salt Lake area, it’s still playing at Brewvies, but theaters change out their shows on Thursday nights so it might not be there tomorrow. If it’s too late for you to catch it in the theater, make sure you pick up the DVD…