Cruise in control for a tense nocturnal thriller

Saturday, STV, 10.35pm

THE first film to be shot using mostly digital technology, Michael Mann’s colour-soaked nocturnal odyssey from 2004 opens with two men who look an awful lot like Tom Cruise and Jason Statham swapping briefcases at Los Angeles International Airport, and then follows taxi driver Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx) as he picks up lawyer Annie Farrell (Jada Pinkett Smith) and deposits her at the office where we learn she is to pull an allnighter on an important case.

She and Max do find time for a mild flirtation, however, after which she gives him her card. File that fact away.

Max’s next fare introduces himself as Vincent and offers him $600 for an all-night, off-the-meter hire involving six visits to six particular addresses and then back to the airport.

A real estate deal, says Vincent, plus a visit to see a friend. Vincent is played by Cruise, of course, here sporting a close-cut beard, grey suit and Richard Gere-style Silver Fox hairdo.

He looks and acts as cool as his back-seat patter is slick.

Max, who has dreams of owning his own limousine company, is contentedly leafing through a brochure for high-end cars and eating a sandwich as he waits for Vincent at the first stopping-of point when the man his fare is visiting lands on the roof of his cab and cracks the windscreen.

“You killed him,” Max shouts when Vincent returns. “No, I shot him,” Vincent replies. “Bullets and the fall killed him.” And so begins a long nightmare for Max as he effectively becomes Vincent’s hostage for what is not a real estate deal at all but a series of contract killings. Vincent is the trigger man.

But as the body count rises and he finds one of his own informants among the dead, quick-thinking LA cop Ray Fanning starts to fit the pieces together.

And so, as the night drags on terrifyingly for Max, as Vincent doggedly pursues his quarry despite all and any set-backs – “Make the best of it, improvise, adapt to the environment,” is his mantra – Fanning gives chase.

Cruise excels when he’s playing against type (see Magnolia, Tropic Thunder, Interview With The Vampire) and nowhere in his storied career does he do it better than here. Mann is in his element as well, turning Los Angeles into a series of strange, nocturnal streetscapes and punctuating the action with the kind of surreal interludes which only ever happen at 3am in a city that never sleeps.