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Tom Cruise this time is a cool professional killer Vincent, a bad guy hired to kill 5 witnesses of a court case. Although acting as the first main character, Cruise does not have much room in elaborating the character's personality under the role. All the viewers can see from Cruise is his rigid face and sharp eyes. Another protagonist is Max (Jamie Foxx), an evening shift taxi driver who has 2 goals: (1) the initial goal of keeping himself alive under the capture from Vincent and (2) the later emerging goal of saving the last witness (not to disclose whom here, find it out yourself). These causal roles of the key characters establish the story causality of the film and are features of the classical Hollywood flicks.

The story is a variant of "Die Hard III" (Dir: John McTiernan, 1995) in which a black owner of an electrical appliance shop is kept on a lethal venture by incidence. Here Max (also Black) is initially seduced and subsequently forced to embark on Vincent's cynical venture in driving him to kill his targets. The entire narrative is told under an unrestricted way (the viewer's range of information is wider than the characters'). All events in the plot happen in 10 hours in LA and their occurrence is apparently logical yet actually beyond the realm. After all, it does not matter because the probability of coincidences and the frequency of event occurrences in the movie world are unduly escalated.

To orientate the spectator toward the protagonists, director Michael Mann puts efforts in nudging the personalities of the key characters, Max in particular, by creating relatively long expository sequences. Even after the exposition, the story proceeds fairly slowly with many scenes on depicting the dilemma Max encounters during his compelled ominous venture and the way Vincent turns from being amiable to grumpy (although the transition is only superficially covered). Despite the openness of the narration, the story generates a high degree of tension from the beginning (when Vincent boards Max's taxi) to the end. Hence he builds up a multiplicity of suspense to keep the viewer in the seat: Who is the next target? Is there any target known to the viewer from previous sequences (this is most tricky in Mann's narrative architecture)? Can Vincent kill all the targets? Will he be caught eventually? If so, how? When and how will Max escape (admitting that the viewer assumes he can do so at the end)? In doing so, Mann successfully instils a high degree of audience activity of formulating probable hypotheses (anticipation) on the story development. The viewer is firstly led by some visual and narrative cues to hypothesize on the story progression and is later confirmed or de-confirmed by some revelations which lead the viewer to hypothesize on an alternative line. Mann makes use of this by placing 5 targets each representing a gap and the denouement comes when all gaps are filled.

In terms of cinematographic aesthetics, Mann uses many shallow focus, rack focus (changing focus), tight close-ups, aerial travelling shots, asymmetrical framing and occasional oblique framing of characters and objects. The sparse (almost without people) mise-en-scenes capturing the night views of LA's empty highways/streets where Max travels through further add power (reinforcing tension) to the narrative.

Though not comparable to the Die Hard series, it is a marvellous, if not excellent, product displaying how an overt narrative gives rise to suspense and tension in a slow-paced macabre story.

註：本評論純屬影評作者個人意見，並不代表本網立場。
Note: This views presented in this review is solely the views of the critic who wrote it and do not represent the stance of our website.

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