Calling Darwin’s Bluff

A Review of Michael Mann’s ‘Collateral’ (2004)

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Jul 11, 2025

By guest contributor Payload.

For decades, Michael Mann had the distinction of never having made a poor or even average film (or show, as he was executive producer of Miami Vice, Crime Story, and Tokyo Vice). Unfortunately, his recent outing with Ferrari (2023) was lackluster by his standards. Hopefully Heat 2 can somehow live up to the original, which most would consider his magnum opus. Since his start as a filmmaker, Mann has made films about obsessive and driven men, men who have a singular focus and drive. Mann often goes into minute detail of how his characters operate. Often, these are cops and criminals (e.g., Thief, Manhunter, Heat, Public Enemies). These men’s lives are then complicated by events surrounding them or the people, often women, who enter into their space. The singularly-focused man is then diverted from his meticulously designed world and forced to deviate off course while attempting to stay on his original path and mission; this almost always leads to the driven man’s demise.

In Collateral, we see these themes, but I would argue that it’s more philosophical and existential than the rest in Mann’s canon. The reason for this is that we have two main characters with very different makeups and worldviews, a dynamic that Mann hadn’t explored as of yet in his career. It’s interesting that Collateral had not originally been Mann’s project; it was in a few other hands before it came to him, and there were numerous casting changes and rewrites of the script. Adam Sandler, for instance, was originally tied to the movie, as was Russell Crowe. Fortunately, Mann landed on the two right actors for the roles. Tom Cruise plays Vincent, who we soon come to find out is an elite, high-end hitman, an expert at disposal. Vincent is yet another man who is singularly driven to the nth degree, as is Mann’s hallmark. It’s also refreshing to see Cruise play a convincing villain. The new element is Jamie Foxx’s character Max, a middling cab driver who has high aspirations and dreams but doesn’t have the will or fortitude to see them through. This is the antithesis of a typical leading man for Mann. So, while Mann is dealing with very familiar territory, he is entering into a new one. His driven man is an evil menace, and his hero is an unassuming cabbie who doesn’t seem to be capable of doing much of anything.

The action gets underway when Max picks Vincent up. Vincent flashes Max a few hundreds to retain his driving services for the night: “I got five stops to make. Collect signatures, see some friends, and then I got a 6 A.M. out of LAX.” Max accepts, since he needs the money. At the first stop, Vincent enters an apartment complex while Max idles in the cab. A body then proceeds to fall from a third-story apartment, landing on Max’s cab, breaking the windshield. Vincent runs down moments later, and Max realizes that Vincent has killed the man. When Max asks him, “You killed him?” Vincent responds, “No, I shot him. Bullets and the fall killed him.” Here we get a loaded few words about which more than a few philosophical term papers could be written. Vincent, as we see here and throughout the film, is a complete moral relativist. Good and bad, right and wrong, truth and falsehood do not exist in his worldview. This is the logical conclusion of the Darwinian evolutionary presupposition. The world and everything in it, including human beings, are in constant flux and change; there is no stasis. You as an individual are just a meat sack, a bag of atoms with no purpose, and your actions have no meaning. All matter is just on a trajectory of constant “progress.” Vincent says what he says to Max because in his worldview, free will cannot exist; everything is determined by biological process.

Vincent is just living out the predator–prey relationship we see in the wild. Murder is nothing because a person’s life means nothing. Therefore, not really making it murder, there is nothing “unlawful” about it. A lion cannot be blamed for killing and eating a gazelle. While carrying a man’s corpse, Vincent tells Max, “It’s only a dead guy.” Thus Vincent is the perfect hitman: imagine what you could do if you didn’t have a conscience holding you back. David Fincher’s recent film The Killer covers similar themes.12

Max is then forced at gunpoint to continue driving Vincent around to his next “appointments.” As the bodies pile up, Max attempts to escape and calls for help a couple of times from bums, who rob him, and a detective, who becomes wise to what Vincent is up to. All end up eliminated by Vincent. Max gradually becomes more fed up and angry, and a new side of him is beginning to emerge. We even get an interesting scene where Vincent insists that they go see Max’s mother, who is in the hospital. Vincent buys Max’s mother flowers because “that’s what you’re supposed to do,” even when Max tells him not to. Vincent states, “She carried you in her womb for nine months.” In Vincent’s worldview, everything is transactional. Max should get his mother flowers not out of love or genuine affection, but because he owes it to her for his having been a burden to her. Love or any metaphysical concepts do not exist for Vincent; if it’s not physical matter, it does not exist.

John Stuart Mill expresses the type of worldview Vincent has:

an arbitrary definition of man, as a being who invariably does that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries, with the smallest quantity of labour and physical self-denial with which they can be obtained.3

There are a host of issues here that Mill and other Enlightenment theorists of his time gloss over and take for granted, such as human nature and what it is. Mill assumes that Man is a blank slate, having empirical information imprinted on his mind, and that this is the only way one can discern what is “true” or “real”; thus, one does a cost-benefit analysis as to what will benefit him the most for the least amount of labor with each decision he makes. This leads to the following questions:

Why is it assumed that every man is capable of doing this analysis? What if a man is not capable of such mental calculus? How would you know that he is?
The terms “benefit” and “self-denial” are value judgments and ethical claims. What authority determined what was beneficial for Man, and why? If one man views an action as beneficial and another doesn’t, is one operating against his own self-interest? Who or what determines this? What if a man makes a decision in his best interest that harms another man? Would that action be right or wrong, good or evil?
Where does reason itself come from according to Mill and his fellow theorists? Do metaphysical (nonphysical) concepts exist? If they do, did the concepts come from sense data or from matter? If not, how do people intelligibly communicate with each other? Write books, or engage in mathematics etc.?

Nevertheless, Vincent is the man Mill describes in the quote and the end result of Enlightenment thinking. He’s Gordon Gekko, just in a different line of work. The below scene continues to expound on Vincent’s worldview and Max’s growing frustration after a nightclub shootout. Max has reached his limit:

Here, Max finally faces up not only to himself but to Vincent and his relativism. Vincent made a decision at some point in his life when he faced “the void” — even though Vincent, based on his own worldview, shouldn’t be able to make his own decisions — which both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky deal with centrally in their writing. Vincent decided to go the route of Nietzsche and become the Übermensch: he saw the world around him as a meaningless and purposeless place, so he went into a career and life where he could use that to his advantage, and he excelled at it. He turned away from the Christian “slave morality” and decided to become a master and take what he wanted where truth, falsehood, and any objective standards were eliminated. All that is left is power in this paradigm. This is “the void.” This is also American culture as such.

Nietzsche and Dostoevsky knew and predicted the unfathomable bloodshed coming in the 20th century. They knew this because they were experts in dealing with “the void.” Vincent has made himself Prometheus, imposing reality via his will. Max, on the other hand, has at this moment decided to go the route of Dostoevsky. Max hasn’t had to face “the void.” The overwhelming majority of people do not: they spend their lives pretending that it doesn’t exist, entertaining and distracting themselves with anything else but this thought. But now Vincent has forced Max’s hand. Max hasn’t had the courage to do anything about it until now, but he can finally own the fact that he’s been a failure up to this point; now he’s going to make a decision. He refuses to accept the way Vincent views the world. He is willing to become a martyr to stop Vincent.

It’s amusing when Max slams the gas and Vincent points a gun at his head. This is the only power Vincent has over him, but Max no longer cares. For the first time, we see fear in Vincent’s eyes. Vincent shouldn’t care whether he dies or not, but he does; Max has shattered Vincent’s entire worldview in one courageous act. Max, of course, isn’t as articulate as Dostoevsky, since he is not a great intellect, but everything he says to Vincent in this scene is a dumbed-down version of Dostoevsky’s work.4 “But you know what? It doesn’t matter. What’s it matter anyway?”

It would be more fitting, in my opinion, if both Vincent and Max died in the car crash, but it’s understandable why this does not happen: that would not have been an acceptable ending for audiences or the studio producing the film. The action continues into a final showdown on a subway, alluding back to a comment Vincent made earlier in the film. Max kills Vincent in a shootout. When Max confronts the dying Vincent, Vincent states: “A guy gets on the MTA here in L.A. and dies. Think anybody will notice?”

Probably not. Most have adopted the materialist worldview that Vincent had, that the vast majority just do not have the will to take power as he did. Both Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky detail this. Not everyone has the strength to see his own worldview through to the end as Vincent does here or as Rodion Raskolinikov does in Crime and Punishment. The solution that Dostoyevsky presents for “the void” is an ultimate one. You can either choose that which is unchanging (The Triune Christian God), transcendent reality, and Truth, or you can have the Darwinian, predator–prey relations, relativism, and flux where you either take power and dominate others or they dominate you. Suicide would also be a logical conclusion in this view. Again, most people solve this problem by not solving it. They ignore asking the question, or “zone out… with daytime TV on for the rest of your life” as Vincent states, and condemn anyone who does ask the question.