The buzz around Collateral is all about Tom Cruise playing a villain. Tom Cruise, if anyone cares, is at his absolute best playing a villain, but this new Michael Mann film has much more going on than that.

Collateral stars Jamie Foxx as Max, a friendly Los Angeles cab driver who is too smart for his job, but not particularly motivated to make any changes. He has plans and dreams, to be sure. He just hasn't acted on any of them.

He picks up a guy named Vincent (Cruise) who wants to hire him to drive for the whole evening. As Max quickly discovers, Vincent is actually a hired killer, using the cab to get from hit to hit. And Max is now a hostage.

Bodies fall in Collateral -- some planned, some not -- and in crunchy, spectacular action fashion, but the film is really an intense character study. Vincent, for example, is not at all the blank assassin. He's a complicated man with a heavily justified and labyrinthine moral code.

The adrenaline in the story comes out of the relationship that develops between the killer and the cabbie as the night unfolds. It's a relationship that includes several very dark laughs.

Each man's personality begins to affect the other's, and these two men rely on each other for survival in bizarre and unexpected ways.

Collateral is all about tension. The city of Los Angeles is dark and menacing and feral here, the police and FBI agents trying to stop the killings add another level of anxiety, and the timing -- it all takes place in one night and Vincent has a deadline -- cranks up the overwhelming sense of dread.

Just in case the claustrophobic taxi setting isn't enough for you, of course.

Beautifully written, visually mesmerizing and with a cast that includes Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo, Barry Shabaka Henley, Bruce McGill and Javier Bardem, Collateral works out to be a sort of thinking man's thriller.

This will not come as any great surprise to those who have seen Heat, The Insider, Manhunter or other of Michael Mann's films.

(This film is rated 14-A)

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