A taxicab. A driver with a conscience. A lone passenger. A suspicion that there’s more to people than meets the eye. The interplay of these simple elements drives Collateral. But if the elements are simple, the effect they create is somewhat more complex. With some movies, knowing the ending is fatal, and yet if we go to any mainstream romance we know beforehand that the bickering male and female leads will end up together. Ditto for most action films: we know that the bad guys will die. This is linked to Hollywood’s desire to render an onscreen universe that is perfect. True love is always found. Evil is always punished. Collateral doesn’t depart from this conventional pattern, and it isn’t giving anything away to say that the bad guy dies at the end. But when grey-haired Vincent (Tom Cruise) hires Max’s (Jamie Foxx) cab for a night in order to carry out five hits, we still get the feeling we’re not being served a standard morality-driven action film. In fact, a sense of Vincent’s fall, of his destiny, right from the start of Collateral gives the film its particular mood. As Max’s cab cruises silently through the dawning streets of LA, and as Vincent quietly sits in the back, we are given time to ponder the outcome of the situation constructed by scriptwriter Stuart Beattie. In these moments director Michael Mann slows the film down, punctuates the soundtrack with slow sad piano music, and moves the film towards a death unlike the death that most film villains suffer. Vincent’s final moments are not rendered with a bang, but with quietness. Vincent’s job as a hitman, which gives him a closeness to death, paradoxically, equally gives him a closeness to life. And while honest, hard-working Max has been unhappily slaving away as a cab driver for twelve years, watching as each day further dwindles the possibility that he will fulfill his dream of owning a limo hire company, Vincent has no regrets or feelings that he has wasted his life. And strangely, certainly unexpectedly, somewhere between nightfall and dawn Vincent helps Max to regain a sense of his own happiness. Somewhere between nightfall and dawn he shows Max that every moment can count, and that even if you lie about your happiness to others, (as Max does with his Mum), there’s no point lying about it to yourself. Vincent’s death, which takes place on a subway, recalls a story he tells Max early in the film: once, he read a newspaper article about a man who died on the subway -- the dead man rode around for six hours, people even sitting next to him, before anyone noticed he was dead. Beattie’s script and Mann’s direction are carrying us towards a point, a destination you could say, that parallels Vincent’s own destination and journey, a point from which we will be able to view Vincent, not as a contract killer, nor as a bad person, but simply as a person, a flawed individual who makes his way through a violent indifferent world as best he can. And in this world where people’s deaths lack meaning because their lives lack meaning, a hitman is, ironically, the one person with a clear grasp of what his life means.