Tom Cruise as an assassin in a silver-grey suit shows up in Los Angeles at dawn and expects to leave at dusk. His job: to eliminate five witnesses in an impending federal prosecution of a drug cartel. He bullies a sweet-tempered taxi-driver, one Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx), into providing transportation all through the night, and "Collateral" turns into a kind of convoluted buddy movie, in which the two men engage in a weird terse dialogue about murder. The plot of "Collateral", which was directed by Michael Mann, is just a movie-ish contrivance, and the violence is no more than thuggishly casual and chic that is, very enjoyable. But shot by shot, scene by scene, Mann may be the best director in Hollywood. Methodical and precise, he analyses a scene into minute components a door closing, an arm thrust out and gathers the fragments into seamless units; he wants you to live inside the physical event, not just experience the sensation of it. "Collateral" comes off like clockwork, but its a clock that breathes - great actors like Mark Ruffolo, Javier Bardem, and Barry Shabaka Henly have sustained intricate moments in the pauses between the violent acts. The New Yorker