Forget Your Comfort Rewatches — 'Collateral' on Peacock Is the Tom Cruise Performance You Need to Revisit

One of the great Los Angeles thrillers is back in your queue. Collateral, Michael Mann’s razor-sharp 2004 neo-noir, begins streaming on Peacock today, October 1 — and if you have only ever known Tom Cruise as the grinning hero of the Mission: Impossible franchise, this is the film that will rewrite your understanding of what he can do.

The setup is brutally simple. Jamie Foxx plays Max, a meticulous cab driver working the Los Angeles night shift, whose routine evening collapses when a passenger — Cruise’s silver-haired hitman Vincent — forces him at gunpoint to drive him from one contract killing to the next. What follows is a single-night odyssey through a city that never quite wakes up, as two men with opposite philosophies of life are chained together in the back of a taxi.

Cruise Like You’ve Never Seen Him

More than two decades later, Collateral remains the definitive counter-argument to anyone who ever called Cruise a limited actor. His Vincent is calm, precise, and genuinely frightening — a professional killer who treats murder as a logistics problem and philosophy as a weapon. It is the darkest role of Cruise’s career, and he plays it with an eerie stillness that makes every scene crackle.

Foxx, meanwhile, earned an Oscar nomination for his work as Max, and it is easy to see why. He is the film’s moral center and its beating heart, a decent man slowly discovering that decency is not the same as passivity. The chemistry between the two leads — locked in a car together for most of the runtime — is the engine that keeps the film running at full throttle.

Mann’s City of Night

Then there is the filmmaking itself. Mann shot Collateral largely on early digital video, giving Los Angeles a grainy, fluorescent glow that no other film has quite captured since. The coyotes crossing the street, the jazz club sequence, the wordless MTA train finale — these are images that have only grown more iconic with time.

What is remarkable is how modern the film still feels. The digital photography that looked radical in 2004 now looks prescient, and the film’s vision of a city connected only by screens, signals, and chance encounters anticipated the texture of contemporary life with uncanny accuracy. Mann was not just making a thriller; he was documenting the moment Los Angeles — and the movies — went digital.

With October viewing season officially underway, there is no better moment to revisit it. Collateral is streaming on Peacock now — and it plays even better than you remember.