Collateral

(Herald rating: * * * *)

"You killed him!" screams the innocent witness dragged into Mobland mayhem on a bloody night in LA. "No, I shot him," explains the hit-man, rationally. "The bullets and the fall killed him."

You gotta love a gangster movie with that kind of dialogue, and there's plenty more where that comes from. You gotta love a movie where Tom Cruise plays the bad guy, and damn well, too. And you gotta love a movie that gives you the chance to see a star being born, and that star is the innocent witness, Jamie Foxx, and we all know where he's going on Oscar night.

Cruise plays Vincent, whose job description reads: I kill people for a living. He's a contract killer on a hit-and-run visit to LA who forces Max, a cabbie (Foxx) to drive him from assignment to assignment (just as well he wasn't relying on an Auckland cabbie to know his way around town).

You don't really need to know much more than that, for this is largely a two-handed play between the cold-blooded killer and his conscience, his everyman at the wheel, debating the way life is as the bodies pile up. Yes, there are other characters but players such as Jada Pinkett Smith are mostly on the sidelines.

As expected from director Michael Mann, best known for Heat, it's slick. It's stylish. It's noir. Okay, not quite noir, more grey if you take Cruise's hair dye as a reference point.

Cruise is happy to let the cameras rove around his action man preparation in the major feature on the highly recommended collectors' edition dvd. It's a 40-minute Making of that shows the lad getting combat training from former marines and having a ball on the firing range. Mann and Foxx add to the big boys' toys feel by practising for the chase scene as they race old cars in the desert.

Mann adds a personal dimension to the commentary (he's a third generation cabbie); there are a couple of short, technically oriented features (Shooting on Location, how we make films at night; Visual Effects, how we shot on board a train that you think is running through LA).

Special Delivery is an astounding, secretly filmed video of Cruise posing as a courier in downtown LA, apparently to persuade the director that he has the goods to play the killer. Yep, in an on-the-street, reality-cam audition, Cruise chats to la locals who don't realise who the guy is. Later he and Foxx allow the cameras into a script rehearsal in Mann's office. On top of this, five Easter eggs offer more treats.