Tom Cruise’s performances click best when the slick performer plays guys who are trying to get away with something, guys who work their cool; vide The Color of Money and Jerry Maguire, in which he played hustlers, or Risky Business and The Firm, where he played neophytes trying to bluff their way out of trouble.  His difficulties come when he goes for for the big emotional play and over-emotes, a problem that goes back as far as Born on the Fourth of July, but which lately has run rampant through Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia (which was a potentially good hustler part), Vanilla Sky and, in extremis, The Last Samurai.  The guy just doesn’t do sincerity well unless it’s tied into a shame reflex.

     Happily, the issue doesn’t arise in Collateral, the new crime drama from Michael “Macho” Mann, in which Cruise plays an out-of-town hitman who drafts an L.A. cab driver as his personal chauffeur for a night of assassination.  Like all of Mann’s movies, it’s a brawny, stylistic insistent – to the point of nagging – effort that demands to be taken seriously.  Way, way, way seriously.  But perhaps sensing his material was a little extreme (the screenplay is credited to Stuart Beattie), or inspired by the presence of funny man Jamie Foxx as the luckless taxi driver, or whatever, Mann has allowed some humor to seep into his usual mélange of tension, bleakness, and existential angst.  As you might expect from someone who hasn’t exactly been a barrel of laughs in the past, Mann’s stabs at yocks are occasionally dubious.  They are welcome all the same.

     Cruise is Vincent (the name of his character in The Color of Money), whom we meet with a classic Mann intro.  Inside a crowded terminal at LAX, the camera picks out Vincent from a crowd using a lens so long that the crew must have set up their camera gear on a distant  runway.  The effect is that only Vincent is in focus, everyone else being reduced to an extremely blurry mass.  Here, in all his ubermensch glory, is a Mann antagonist standing tall and clear above the herd.

     Vincent pulls a satchel switcheroo in the terminal, obviously to pick up a gun he wouldn’t have been able to carry on the plane he just disembarked.  Mann uses the occasion to pump up Vincent’s macho credentials; when, to facilitate the exchange, he “accidentally” bumps his contact, Vincent and his contact collide like hockey players with a grudge (the other guy, who doesn’t turn up for the rest of the film, is played by Jason Statham, who appeared in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and starred in The Transporter).  So we got it: Special guy, very, very macho.

     At the same time, we’ve been meeting Foxx’s character, Max, who, we find out, is the most anal retentive cab driver in L.A.  We also witness a “meet cute” between him and a passenger, Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith), a federal prosecutor, who is intrigued by this oh-so-bright, oh-so-deep hack.  When Max drops Annie off at a downtown federal building, she gives him her card, as if we didn’t know they were bound to meet up by climax time.

     Vincent grabs Max’s ride as Annie gets out, and this is nearly the last time Mann uses film in the movie.  From here on in, he sticks mostly to a very high-grade digital system.  This is probably the most sensible use of videography in a major studio production to date.  It flattens the sense of depth within the cab, so in the many scenes that overwhelming Vincent and pinned-down Max have together, there’s a sense of claustrophobic menace that’s creepily enhanced by the flat, electronic fuzz.  The backgrounds and establishing shots manage to make Los Angeles, the most photographed of all movie cities, look different, more washed out, more smeared.  The ultimate, subliminal upshot is to drain Vincent’s business of any glamour; the way the colors wash into each other makes everything look like it’s draining into a sewer.

     Mann is so digitally adept that I’m still not sure if he switched back to film for an extraordinarily well-edited (Jim Miller and Paul Rubell are the editors) shoot-out in a nightclub jam-packed with dancers and drinkers .  The gunplay features a daunting array of players: Vincent, Max, the L.A. Police, the F.B.I., and two separate criminal gangs.  Moreover, each individual or group has a distinct agenda, i.e., they want to kill different people.  Yet, unlike so many action scenes today, this one is entirely coherent; you can follow what’s happening to whom despite the swiftness of the action and what, to the participants and the myriad innocent bystanders, is confusion.

     Throw in an exceptionally high-performance supporting cast – Mark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem, Peter Berg, and more – and you would have an extremely good film.

     Unfortunately, Mann can’t resist the temptation to make Vincent a philosopher as well as a killer.  This is a running Mann problem and is often his downfall.  It certainly doesn’t sink Collateral, but it’s not the only problem.  There’s the question of the off-key humor, in particular a visit to Max’s mother in her hospital room.  Some of the plotting – tension between the local L.A. police and “the feds,” for instance – is rote.  Occasionally, the digital shots just don’t work at all, as in one sequence in which Vincent’s hair turns from mostly gray to mostly black in the middle of a conversation; but even ordinary shots sometimes look too “cooked,” and become distracting.

     The L.A. thriller has needed a shot in the arm, though, and Mann and Cruise do shock the feline genre into at least momentary life.  Cruise plays his perfectly-tailored part with an old Hollywood ease.  Mann may not be quite so perfect, but he had a much bigger order to fill, and he does so well so often, that it’s pretty easy to take much good with some bad.