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Professional A-plus/B-minus movie director Michael Mann (Ali, The Insider, Heat) treads water with a so-so film noir crime story featuring Tom Cruise (The Last Samurai, Minority Report, Vanilla Sky) as Vincent, a creepy bad person (no stretch for the Cruisemaster, right?), and Jamie Foxx (Breakin’ All the Rules, Ali, Any Given Sunday) as Max, a regular-guy cabbie who has the misfortune to pick up a guy who looks like he just lost a Richard Gere look-alike contest. Seriously, it’s all about workin’ the salt-and-pepper hair in this flick for Mr. Cruise, who seems to be trying to rein it in and project some kinda Inner Power or something while his character (we hope) is blabbering on about his philosophy of playing one’s life like it’s jazz. Please, it’s almost as annoying as John Travolta doing that fuckin’ L. Ron Hubbard movie about calisthenics or dietetics or whatever. Anyway, director Mann gets to shoot the rest of his cool-Los Angeles-locations wad from his failed teevee series Robbery Homicide Division with lots of scenes in front of stores without an English-language sign in sight, and there’s all kindsa aerial footage lovingly caressing the nighttime-LA-light-grid-sprawl. So it’s an OK crime picture that gets cooking after about an hour, and if that’s your bag, then you should take a peek. And while the guys who shot this (Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron) ain’t no Dante Spinotti (Heat, The Insider), it’s worth two hours of your life in a cool dark room if you’re about the cinematography.

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