It’s been 35 years since Top Gun first launched Tom Cruise to the top of the Hollywood A-list, and he’s largely remained there for so long by essentially playing himself over and over. The actor knows audiences love to see him headline broad spectacle-driven blockbusters that feature his signature brand of daredevil risk-taking, and it’s a formula that’s served him incredibly well over the decades.
However, when Cruise ventures outside of his action hero wheelhouse, he tends to deliver the best work of his career. He’s got three Academy Award nominations to his name for going firmly against his usual grain in Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire and Magnolia, while he buried himself under heavy prosthetics to steal every scene of Tropic Thunder he was in.
One thing the 58 year-old hardly ever does, though, is play the bad guy, but Michael Mann’s 2004 noir thriller Collateral proved that he was unsurprisingly great at that as well. Cruise sports gray hair and a mean streak as hired killer Vincent, who enters a reluctant partnership with Jamie Foxx’s cabbie Max as he enlists the driver’s services to ferry him from one hit to the next, with the police and FBI soon ending up hot on their tail.
Foxx may have landed an Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actor, but Tom Cruise is every bit as good in the type of role you’d never expect him to play, and it’s nothing short of a travesty that he’s shown no interest in sinking his teeth into another villainous turn in the seventeen years since. Collateral is now streaming for free on IMDb TV, and it’s well worth checking out if you can handle the ad interruptions that come with not having to pay to watch.