TOm Cruise,Jamie foxx,Jada pinkeet smith,Mark ruffalo,Peter berg,bruce mcgill.
Summary
Directed by Michael Mann, the crime thriller Collateral features Tom Cruise as a hitman hired to take out witnesses before a big trial and Jamie Foxx as the cab driver who unwittingly becomes his accomplice. With Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo, and Javier Bardem in its cast, the 2004 film received critical acclaim for its direction, performances, and suspenseful plot.
Although Tom Cruise and Jason Statham shared the screen once before in 2004’s Collateral, this team-up only left viewers wishing for more. Collateral is a propulsive crime thriller starring Tom Cruise as a cold, calculated hitman who hires Jamie Foxx’s beleaguered taxi driver as his chauffeur for the night. Over the course of a long, tense evening, Cruise’s killer dispatches witnesses for a trial one by one as Foxx’s terrified hostage ferries him from place to place. Collateral is one of director Michael Mann’s best movies, a stylish neo-noir that sees Cruise play against type as a ruthless villain
Cruise’s performance is a revelation, but Foxx’s agitated everyman grounds Collateral’s action and ensures Mann's movie has some much-needed humanity. However, one of the movie’s most underrated scenes occurs before Cruise’s character even meets the movie’s hero.Collateral and The Transporter franchise cross over briefly in the movie’s opening scene when Cruise’s character encounters a mysterious criminal played by Jason Statham. Although the two characters barely interact, Cruise and Statham’s stoic criminals make a pivotal trade while at LAX airport. This establishes Cruise’s smooth villainy while implying Statham’s character is a fellow figure from the criminal underworld
Jason Statham & Tom Cruise Shared The Screen In Collateral (For Just One Scene)
Collateral’s Jason Statham Cameo Crossed Over With The Transporter
In Collateral’s opening scene, Cruise’s Vincent walks into Jason Statham’s unnamed Airport Man. The two bump into each other and make a display of apologizing, switching their bags in the process. Statham's character is never seen again, but it is heavily implied that his encounter with Vincent was part of the hitman’s criminal master plan. Vincent spends the rest of the night carrying out the assassinations of various high-profile witnesses in an upcoming trial. As such, it is fair to presume that Statham’s Airport Man was providing him with intel and weapons for this job in the opening scene
Unfortunately, despite Jason Statham playing countless action heroes in the years since the movie’s release, Cruise and Statham haven’t appeared in the same movie together since this Collateral scene. When Collateral was released in 2004, Statham was an emerging star thanks to hits like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and The Transporter. Since then, he has gone on to become a major A-list star like Cruise himself. However, as Cruise took a step away from the big screen between 2017 and 2022, the opportunities for the pair to share the screen diminished
Why Jason Statham Had A Cameo In Collateral (Was He Playing Frank Martin?)
Statham’s Cameo In Michael Mann’s Movie Links Collateral And The Transporter
Although Collateral never confirms or denies whether Statham’s character is The Transporter’s Frank Martin, it is pretty easy to discern whether this fan theory makes sense. Not only is the Airport Man identical to Frank, but both Collateral and The Transporter franchise could reasonably take place in the same fictional universe. The Transporter movies are a little sillier and campier in tone than Mann’s dark thriller, but Vincent’s brutal efficiency as a hired killer calls to mind Frank Martin’s unsparing approach to his work as a criminal. Statham’s character fits in the world of Collateral and vice versa. As such, it is reasonable to assume that Collateral’s Airport Man could be The Transporter’s Frank Martin. However, this has never been confirmed by Mann or anyone else involved in the movie’s production. What makes the theory more compelling is the fact that the Airport Man does the same job as The Transporter’s Frank Martin. Both men are hired by criminals to bring mysterious, valuable packages from one place to another. This is a pretty specific role, so the fact that Collateral’s Airport Man only appears to drop a bag into the hands of another career criminal seems telling. ADV8
I Really Wish Jason Statham & Tom Cruise Would Star In A Movie Together
Statham And Cruise Are Perfectly Suited To Sharing The Screen
While the pair’s paths haven’t crossed since, it would be great to see Statham and Cruise reunited onscreen. After the high-profile failure of 2017’s The Mummy, Cruise has become increasingly selective about the projects that he takes on. However, he is still headlining the Mission: Impossible franchise, and Statham would be a perfect addition to Ethan Hunt’s ever-growing lineup of fellow spies. Statham has the opposite problem to Cruise as, between the Fast & Furious movies, their Hobbs and Shaw spinoffs, the Meg movies, the Expendables franchise, and The Beekeeper’s inevitable sequel, he is a very busy man. That said, it is hard to imagine Statham turning down a chance to work with Cruise on another action movie were the opportunity to arise. Cruise is a screen legend and remains one of the most profitable action stars in the world, despite the under performance of 2023’s Mission: Impossible sequel. As such, Jason Statham and Tom Cruise should still reunite 20 years after their brief encounter in Collateral.
During the approach of the most powerful storm in decades, university professor Dr. Jo Harding (Helen Hunt) and an underfunded team of students prepare the prototype for Dorothy, a ground-breaking tornado data-gathering device conceived by her estranged husband, Bill (Bill Paxton). When Harding tells Bill that Dorothy is ready for testing -- and that their privately funded rival Dr. Jonas Miller (Cary Elwes) has stolen the idea and built his own -- Bill rejoins the team for one last mission.
Summary
In Twister, Bill and Jo Harding, advanced storm chasers on the brink of divorce, must join together to create an advanced weather alert system by putting themselves in the cross-hairs of extremely violent tornadoes. Jo's childhood was stricken by the trauma of losing her father to a deadly F5 tornado, setting her on the path of a storm chaser. Having developed a new technology with her team named "Dorothy," Jo seeks to make Tornadoes more predictable to give people a chance to make it to safety. Jo's obsession created a rift between her husband, but new breakthroughs may bring them back together as the two pursue their greatest challenge yet - an incoming system that will produce yet an incoming system that will produce yet another F5.
Emmy Raver-Lampman
Josh Hutcherson
Bobby Naderi
Jemma Redgrave
The Beekeeper
Imagine that one of the boiler room scumbags from "The Wolf of Wall Street" bankrupted Jason Bourne’s mother. That's more or less the starting point of "The Beekeeper," which stars Jason Statham as a wraithlike ex-commando who metes out Old Testament vengeance against tech bros who use the latest inventions to rob people online.
Statham's character is named Adam Clay, an MMA upgrade of Clint Eastwood's The Man with No Name. We don't know anything about Adam except that he lives out in the country raising bees and selling their honey, and that he's played by Statham, which means he's no ordinary beekeeper. His best friend is an older woman named Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad), who lives in the farmhouse near his and rents him space in her barn. According to Adam, Eloise is the only person who ever took care of him. Eloise makes the terrible mistake of responding to a phishing scam from a data mining company that empties her bank account as well as the account of a nonprofit she helped found, leading to tragedy. Adam trades his beekeeper uniform for commando gear and disguises, and works his way up the criminal food chain, doing what the law won't.
ss precisely what he means when he describes her that way. It's to the film's credit that it never elaborates, just as it never elaborates on who Adam was before he became a super-duper extra-secret commando who has never been fingerprinted and exists outside of every known governmental structure and seems (from other characters' descriptions) to be sort an agent of self-regulation for society.
01:05/02:25
6.9K
The Beekeeper
The film is the brainchild of director David Ayer ("Suicide Squad," "Fury") and veteran action film and thriller screenwriter Kurt Wimmer (who wrote or co-wrote remakes of "The Thomas Crown Affair," "Point Break" and "Total Recall"). It appreciates the virtues of its leading man, who appears to have come by his muscles honestly, and does everything from dialogue to martial arts to gunplay as simply as possible.
Statham is the kind of leading man who makes you lean forward in your seat, and he's gotten better with age. This performance builds on his superb work in Guy Ritchie's "Wrath of Man," which also presented him with the challenge of riveting an audience's attention while playing a character who was more of an idea than a person. Statham's matter-of-fact minimalism in "The Beekeeper" makes it all the more moving when Adam tersely speaks of how much Eloise meant to him, or waxes philosophical on the organization of the beehive and the necessity of ensuring a functioning society. There aren't too many action heroes who could deliver a line like "I believe there's good in the universe" and not only make you believe that the character believes it but that the film believes it.
A word about the bad guys: It's genuinely impressive how well-cast they are, especially considering their number. Standouts include David Witts as Garnett, the boiler room leader who personally bilks Eloise, narrating his conquest to a room full of junior vultures with the brio of a Tom Cruise-style '80s go-getter; Josh Hutcherson as the data mining company's vice president Derek Danforth, the spoiled, sleazy, coked-out son of the president of the United States (Jemma Redgrave); Jeremy Irons as Derek's boss, former CIA director Wallace Westwyld, an exasperated cynic who seems as if he wandered in from “Veep”; and Taylor James as a braying wanker of a mercenary who brags that he once killed a guy like Adam and can't wait to do it again. They're all morally and/or physically revolting. Derek looks like he's been marinating in oat milk, and Hutcherson reads his lines in that preppie teenage snot voice that a lot of trust fund boys never lose even when they enter their fifties. When James' character gets worked up while denigrating Adam, he spits misty plumes of saliva. Irons is dressed and lit to exaggerate the royal rotter look that made him so perfect in 1990s black comedies, psychosexual thrillers and horror flicks.
It's a real shame that "The Beekeeper" isn't the righteous trash masterpiece that it keeps threatening to turn into. There's a great pop hit in here somewhere—probably one that focused exclusively on Adam and the awful people he's going after. But the film is scattered and annoyingly glib at times. There's a well-acted but ultimately unnecessary secondary plot about Eloise's FBI agent daughter Verona Parker (Emmy Raver-Lampman) and her partner Matt Wiley (Bobby Naderi), who want to catch Adam and put him in jail even though Verona's initial theory about his complicity is instantly proved wrong. It seems as if she should recognize him as more of a Dr. Richard Kimble-type. The FBI duo has undeniable chemistry, but the buddy cop comedy riffing in their scenes undercuts Verona, who should be as furious about and focused on what happened to her mother as Adam is.
Worse, politically and philosophically the movie wimps out in the end, in the way that a lot of vigilante action flicks wimp out: by reassuring us that the problem isn't systemic corruption baked into the national character or the human species, but a few bad apples doing bad stuff without their well-meaning boss's knowledge or approval. Even the most socially critical Hollywood genre films tend to lose their nerve in this way. They tell us that the problem is not systemic and purposeful corruption embedded in the marrow of our institutions, but anomalous people whose removal will restore things to their natural state of nobility. There was an opportunity to do something truly bold here, but the movie didn’t take it. If there's any working actor who could literally as well as figuratively Burn It All Down and bring audiences to their feet cheering, it's Statham.
Still, at its best, which is when Statham dominates the screen, shooting and maiming bad guys and setting gigantic fires, "The Beekeeper" is a work in the spirit of "Billy Jack" and the original “Walking Tall." It's a fantasy about how satisfying it would be to brutalize and kill the sorts of white-collar crooks who prey on innocent people without fear of punishment. Watching "The Beekeeper" made me think about the elderly people in my life who have been victimized by scam artists, estate predators, and other swindlers, and the police and court officers who refused to lift even a pinky to help get justice for them. And how satisfying it would be for all of them to get into their cars, glance at their rearview mirrors, and see Jason Statham in the back seat.
