In Collateral, Tom Cruise plays the worst assassin ever. What kind of assassin dresses like that? Ridiculous bouffant grey hair, a raggy grey beard, an immaculate, bright silver suit, ridiculous sun glasses at night? The guy sticks out like a sore thumb, the kind of guy any bystander would instantly recall with perfect clarity (“I haven’t seen anyone looking like him in LA for 20 years, officer.”) Then there’s his trade technique, which is to integrally involve a random stranger – a cab driver – in his five-in-one-night hit marathon, an operational design he’s followed before, we are told. What assassin would not want to maximize randomness, chaos, operational complexity, and personal vulnerability in this way? And what assassin would not want his whole getaway plan resting on the caprice of his terrified and resentful hostage?

What kind of assassin keeps all his “intel” in an expensive black suitcase, which he leaves in the cab while he’s off dicking around for hours and hours? All he ever looked at out of that bag concerning his targets was a face shot and an address. Christ, he could have had that on one piece of paper in his pocket! Any real assassin would have all that shit memorized, of course, but not this jackass. Instead he leaves his bag of crucial information (which if lost will cost him his life) in the cab with his unrestrained hostage, inviting disaster. He almost loses the bag once, during the second hit, when Jamie Fox gets mugged in the cab – if Cruise comes out of the building 30 seconds later, it’s totally gone and he’s totally dead. It’s hilarious that his hostage is actually smarter than he is at this shit, quickly realizing that all he has to do is grab the bag and dispose of it in some way and his captor is toast.

Then there’s his hit technique. For his first hit, the clown shoots his target in front of a window, blowing him out and down four stories onto the sidewalk, and then proceeds to stuff him in the trunk of the cab for the entire evening, the smashed-up cab with a shattered windshield and a jumpy hostage driving it, destined to be pulled over by cops at some point. He shoots the jazz club guy in the head while waitstaff are cleaning up in the very next room! (Lucky for him, no one hears or notices anything.) Then he finds his fourth target in a night club filled with armed government agents, the LAPD, the target’s own armed bodyguards, and club security, and he charges in like Rambo, initiating a free for all shoot ’em up which leaves at least 20-30 people dead, himself completely conspicuous the entire time. And this bonehead thinks he’s going to fly out of LAX the very next morning?

And while we’re at it, what kind of Mexican drug cartel is going to hire one guy to sequentially kill five crucial witnesses across a single evening? Mexican drug cartels are not short of money. They would hire five guys, one for each target, and hit them all at the same time, and they would have better intel than shit like “he’ll be at the club” (surrounded by armed body guards and hundreds of witnesses.) They wouldn’t hire one incompetent whack-job to go on a fucking killing spree, the kind of dipshit who would not only take a random hostage just for the fun of it and then completely rely on them as their get-away plan for the entire evening of killing, but who would also waste time visiting the hostage’s mother in a hospital, surrounded by cops and witnesses, with his hostage free to do anything he wants: run for it, alert the police, or even just assault a police officer and get himself arrested, thereby staying alive and completely derailing the assassin’s schemes.

Collateral was sort of fun, in a dopey kind of way. I’ll leave it at that.