Morals are fuzzy in Collateral, so the visuals are fuzzy too. If you’ve ever wondered why directors are so esteemed - given that they neither write the script, speak the lines nor point the camera - you could do worse than check out this new film by Michael Mann (of Heat, The Insider and Ali fame, among others). Mann’s specialty are male protagonists in existential crisis – his films could be subtitled ‘What Does It Mean to be a Man?’ – and ‘pregnant’ moments, where style is used to express stillness, dislocation and urban alienation. Without the style he brings to it, and especially the way style reinforces content, Collateral would be nothing at all, just a flimsy genre piece; because the plot is unfortunately very stupid.

 Let’s not waste time on the stupid plot, except to say it concerns a hitman in the cab of an LA taxi driver. The cabbie is played by Jamie Foxx, the hitman by a silver-haired Tom Cruise, whose character is the one behaving stupidly. The foolishness hurts, because Mann’s films are founded on professionalism; his characters are alienated because they’re pros, and have sacrificed emotion in the pursuit of gleaming, risk-averse perfection. Think of Robert De Niro as the ultra-cautious master thief in Heat, whose motto was: “Never get attached to anything you’re not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner”. He’d have looked at Cruise’s methods in Collateral, shaken his head and dismissed him as a lightweight.

 Yet Cruise has the coldness of a true pro: he kills people, and calls it his job. He’s bypassed morality, and is totally straight about it. For him, LA is the epitome of the “disconnected” urban sprawl – a place where a man can die on the subway and no-one even notices he’s dead. For Foxx, on the other hand, LA is “my home”. He’s a good man, and tries to be humble – yet his moral life is just as fuzzy as Cruise’s. He lies to his sick mother, telling her he’s a big success when he’s really just a cabbie. He deludes himself about his future, and keeps a photo of a beach in the Maldives to gaze at when things get tense, escaping his problems rather than confront them. His life is built on little white lies. Is it really any better than Cruise’s arrogant self-sufficiency?

 The visuals are Michael Mann’s way of saying ‘yes’, siding with the poor deluded cabbie against the cynical hitman. Collateral is his first film shot on Digital Video, which is cheaper than celluloid but also very different. Video doesn’t capture contrast very well; if you shot on video in Cyprus in the summer, the contrast between bright light and shadow would flare out your image, leaving it flat and denuded. Many directors have been flummoxed by video; Mann, however, uses it like a master.

 Collateral is among the year’s best-looking films, but its look is unique: the light doesn’t seem to be coming from anywhere – it’s diffuse, imbuing the images with a cloudy beauty. Mann turns video’s lack of contrast into an advantage. Most of the film is shot at night, with warm orange light amid the blackness (unlike the harsh neon lights in Heat); LA feels like a great womb. Seen from a distance, its streets full of cars, the city has the teeming, bunched-together life of a murky fishbowl full of headlight-sprouting fish.