Wrong guy, right turn

Literally and metaphorically, “Collateral” peers deeply and persuasively into darkness. Skillfully directed by Michael Mann and featuring strong work by Jamie Foxx as a night-shift cabdriver and Tom Cruise as his all-night passenger, this sharp and exciting thriller examines the vast disconnected physical blackness that is Los Angeles at night as well as the murkier aspects of its characters’ souls.

Mann’s first theatrical feature, 1981’s “Thief,” was a crime story, and though the director has gone on to work in a wide spectrum (“The Insider,” “Ali,” “The Last of the Mohicans”), he’s retained an affinity for the genre. In films like “Heat,” “Manhunter” and now “Collateral,” he’s been especially good at depicting driven outsiders who are swallowed whole by their professions, case-hardened types on both sides of the law who take pride in what they do and demand to be respected for it.

Initially, Foxx’s Max Durocher seems to be an exception to that rule. In a role that is a further departure from the high-energy comedy that started the actor’s career, he convincingly plays a veteran Yellow Cab driver, 12 years behind the wheel with the glasses to prove it, a decent, almost diffident citizen who’s not noticeably secure or self-confident.

Yet, as we see when Assistant U.S. Atty. Annie Farrell (Jada Pinkett Smith, elegant, empathetic and at the top of her game) gets into his cab, Max does have a drive to excel at what he does. He doesn’t back away from a contretemps with the confident Annie about the best way to get to Spring Street downtown, and soon he’s talking about his dream of starting Island Limo, a car service so relaxing you won’t want the trip to end.

When Max drops Annie off at 6 p.m., his next fare is Vincent (Cruise), someone we’ve already glimpsed purposefully striding through LAX with a deliberate, unapologetic confidence. He tells Max he’s in town to close a real estate deal, and he offers the cabby $700 to chauffeur him to five stops and get him to the airport on time for his early morning flight. Max is reluctant, but Vincent is a man who is used to getting his way.

What Vincent also is, Max very soon finds out, is an experienced, implacable contract killer, an unstoppable death machine given to saying things like “I didn’t kill him, I shot him. The bullets and the fall killed him.” Even though events blow Vincent’s cover, he is determined to keep going, likening the new situation to modern jazz: “It’s off-melody, behind the notes, not what’s expected, improvised -- like tonight.”

Vincent and Max will spend many hours together, and no one will be surprised to learn that the experience changes them both. Yet it is one of the virtues of Stuart Beattie’s script that “Collateral” offers numerous unexpected moments as the intense time the two men share leads to the creation of a kind of connection neither one anticipates or even wants.

It’s Max, whose anguished “I can’t do this” is the understandable reaction to Vincent’s post-murder demands, who has the most to cope with. But his exposure to Vincent’s Gangster Way of Knowledge, his night of hit man therapy, if you will, finds Max increasingly capable of doing things he never imagined possible.

Similarly, the demands of the role call forth the most pleasantly nuanced performance of Foxx’s career, improving even on the excellent work he did as Drew “Bundini” Brown in “Ali.” He is the film’s audience surrogate, and enclosed in the small taxi space with Cruise for long stretches of time, his is the performance that draws us in and sustains us.

That said, however, neither Foxx’s acting nor “Collateral” as a whole would be as successful as it is without Cruise’s powerfully confident performance to work off of. The actor changed his hair color to silvery gray, changed his character’s moral outlook to pitch black and made adroit use of his charisma and control to give us someone whose perfectionism has made him something of a star in his rarified profession.

Director Mann is a perfectionist as well, someone who knew exactly the kind of expensive but unusual suit (“made by the best tailor in Kowloon”) he wanted Vincent to wear and didn’t hesitate to use the name Yellow Cab on vehicles with the Bell Cab colors because he didn’t respond to the name “Bell.”

Mann’s passionate involvement in every area of filmmaking has paid off across the board. The director and his team have cast the film with uniformly fine actors, such as Mark Ruffalo in a key role as a suspicious police detective, Javier Bardem in a memorable cameo as a charismatic drug lord and Jason Statham in little more than a walk-on as an airport contact.

Mann has also paid his usual meticulous attention to the soundtrack, playing the Groove Armada/Richie Havens “Hands of Time” over Annie Farrell’s cab ride and Paul Oakenfold’s pulsating “Ready Steady Go” over the film’s action centerpiece, a spectacularly choreographed and edited (Jim Miller and Paul Rubell) example of virtuoso violence in a Korean nightclub that took nine days to shoot.

“Collateral” and production designer David Wasco have shot in often unseen areas of the city, like a nightclub in Pico Rivera, and made the parts of the city we have seen look different. With cinematographers Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron using a high-definition digital video camera called the Thomson Grass Valley Viper FilmStream for most of the shoot, “Collateral” shows us more clarity and color over a greater distance -- seeing downtown clearly from Pico-Union, for instance -- than we’ve seen before.

As a result of Mann’s craftsmanship and concern, “Collateral” crackles with energy and purpose, a propulsive film with character on its mind and confident men and women on both sides of the camera. “It’s what I do for a living,” Cruise’s Vincent likes to say when pressed. Making films like this is what Michael Mann does for his.

*

‘Collateral’

MPAA rating: R for violence and language

Times guidelines: Much violence but not a lot of blood

Tom Cruise ... Vincent

Jamie Foxx ... Max

Jada Pinkett Smith ... Annie

Mark Ruffalo ... Fanning

Peter Berg ... Weidner

DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures present a Parkes/MacDonald Production and an Edge City Production, released by DreamWorks Pictures. Director Michael Mann. Producers Michael Mann, Julie Richardson. Executive producers Frank Darabont, Rob Fried, Chuck Russell, Peter Giuliano. Screenplay Stuart Beattie. Cinematographers Dion Beebe, Paul Cameron. Editors Jim Miller, Paul Rubell. Costumes Jeffrey Kurland. Music James Newton Howard. Production design David Wasco. Art director Daniel T. Dorrance. Set decorator Alexandra Reynolds Wasco. Running time: 2 hours.

In general release.