Tom Cruise: 5 Awesome Performances and 5 That Sucked

4. Vincent - Collateral

tom-cruise-collateral1 Tom Cruise has so often played the straight, smiling, charismatic hero, with the glamorous girl ready to save the day without succumbing to so much as a scratch. As you'll discover, Cruise is at his mightiest when he's threatening with a magnetic edge. Collateral is one of Cruise's more abstract film choices. The premise of Collateral is fairly simple - Cruise plays Vincent, a charming hitman who hires a cab to drive him to 5 locations so he can kill his targets. In the hands of somebody other than Michael Mann it would be a straightforward noir thriller, but Collateral is so much more. Cruise's performance in Collateral is his most underrated, especially when compared to the gushing praise his co-star Jamie Foxx received. Cruise goes 'bad guy' and much like Denzel Washington in Training Day, a whole new dynamic is created and it's impossible to think of Cruise in the same way after viewing Collateral. Cruise, for once, goes understated and minimalist, creating a creepy aura around Vincent, that amounts to an overwhelming sense of psychological intensity whenever he speaks. Cruise's eyes tell the story in Collateral, there's an icy chill to them, the look of a man who is hardened by the unspeakable acts he has committed, but somehow there is a vulnerable humanity to him. The way he accepts his fate at the end shows this better than anything. In many ways, Collateral is the Tom Cruise film for people who don't like Tom Cruise, it would be easy to mistake him on first glance, with the grey hair, soft voice and intense glare and none of the characteristics people associate with Tom Cruise and his movies. There's that saying that actors never get recognised by the Academy for their best work, whilst Tom Cruise did (more on that later), Collateral is right near the top of his filmography and was one of the finest performances of 2004.
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