Jamie Foxx (Collateral), Nominated for Best Supporting Actor

Last night I watched the movie Collateral, directed by Michael Mann. Mann is known for movies like Ali, The Insider and Heat. So yeah, you could say I was expecting a pretty damn good movie.

The movie also starred Tom Cruise and Jada Pinkett-Smith. I was rather suprised to see Jada in the movie. I had not heard she was a part of it.

Jamie Foxx was really good. He really got into character, as this timid man who had set his dreams beyond where he could ever reach. Kind of a man who is stuck in a rut but doesn't know it. In denial of where he is in his life, where he ought to be or where he wished he could be. And regardless of his shortcomings, has a good feel for life. And values life. Puts himself before others.

So yea I thought he deserved the nomination.

The movie. I liked it. Everything was good from the beginning, the soundtrack set the tone and the camera work was really good. I've yet to see a Tom Cruise movie that I didn't like. He's a been around long enough so he knows, and has built his career around making the right choices. I suppose here I can make another point about Ben Affleck. As we know he's a big gambler. This might explain his penchant of picking up the worst scripts in the world and just doing them. Maybe he just needs the money?

There was kind of a lot to kinda think about. Tom's character - Vincent - had an interesting way of looking at life. As a hit-man, he justified his killings by pointing out that thousands of people are dying in Rwanda, and most people don't even know about. So why would anyone care about the people he kills? His life is so empty that you feel sorry for the guy. He has no reason to live, no one to live for. He feels absolutely no remorse for his killings. He just shrugs it off.

But then he also keeps Max (Foxx) alive.

I can't quite understand why he keeps saving Max's life, other than maybe he doesn't know the city well enough and needs someone to drive him around. Or maybe it's just his "style". One of the policemen alludes to a previous job, about a cab driver going around killing people and then shooting himself at the end. Could this be one of Vincent's previous jobs? Possibly. So maybe it's just the way he goes about things so he feels it's important to finish his work with Max, and then maybe shoot him afterwards and make it look like a suicide.

Whatever. The perfectly good movie was ruined at the end. Um.. Spoiler Alert. At then end in the subway there is a shootout between Max and Vincent, face to face they start shooting at eachother, and by some miracle, the cab driver outshoots the contract killer. A man trained to drive a car from destination to destination, OUTGUNS a gunman. A man trained to kill people, is killed, by a man trained to drive a car. A driver kills the killer.

If you didn't understand that, it's like training to be a boxer your entire life, fighting professionally for 6 years, and then getting knocked out by a ballerina. Now how realistic is that?

Okay, so the ratings. I'll give 81/100 on Foxx's performance and 71/100 for the movie.