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Collateral: A Movie Review
Oct. 23rd, 2007 11:46 amThe other night, Collateral was on here in Japan. Tom Cruise, Jamie Fox? My wife said "Oh, you'll like this." And I was prepared to, but . . .
The cabby and the lawyer bump into each other. Okay, I'm expecting that this is the love interest. And then the cabby picks up Tom Cruise. Forced coincidence, there. And he parks in just the right place in the alley for the body to fall on the roof. And . . . the blasted coincidences were just too much for me. I felt as if someone (aka the writers and director) were forcing the plot. Right down to the last target being the love interest?
There was that strange coyote walking across the road scene. I'm still not sure whether that was supposed to be a sop to literary icons and imagery, or whether it was just a random scene.
Oh, and then the careful oddity of Tom deciding to chop through the cable which carries power and telephone so that we can isolate the two and have a mano-et-mano confrontation. Kill the power? Why not throw the big switch just over the cable? Nah, we got to do it the hard way.
The final gunfight was a bit too stylized for my taste, too. "I'm a professional" so they both blaze away at each other through the doors? And then poor Tom finds he's out of magazines (having magically produced them throughout the whole thing) or does he just drop the last one? And his abdominal wound is such that he sits down and (as my wife says) dies gracefully. Kind of felt like the old westerns, with the extended death scenes.
A check of the IMDB site shows that most people loved this film. I'm not sure why I couldn't overlook the continuing coincidental twists, but . . . not for me.
The cabby and the lawyer bump into each other. Okay, I'm expecting that this is the love interest. And then the cabby picks up Tom Cruise. Forced coincidence, there. And he parks in just the right place in the alley for the body to fall on the roof. And . . . the blasted coincidences were just too much for me. I felt as if someone (aka the writers and director) were forcing the plot. Right down to the last target being the love interest?
There was that strange coyote walking across the road scene. I'm still not sure whether that was supposed to be a sop to literary icons and imagery, or whether it was just a random scene.
Oh, and then the careful oddity of Tom deciding to chop through the cable which carries power and telephone so that we can isolate the two and have a mano-et-mano confrontation. Kill the power? Why not throw the big switch just over the cable? Nah, we got to do it the hard way.
The final gunfight was a bit too stylized for my taste, too. "I'm a professional" so they both blaze away at each other through the doors? And then poor Tom finds he's out of magazines (having magically produced them throughout the whole thing) or does he just drop the last one? And his abdominal wound is such that he sits down and (as my wife says) dies gracefully. Kind of felt like the old westerns, with the extended death scenes.
A check of the IMDB site shows that most people loved this film. I'm not sure why I couldn't overlook the continuing coincidental twists, but . . . not for me.
