By Rex Reed

August 8, 2004 | 8:00 p.m

Battered by diabolical summer con jobs like Jonathan Demme's

bloated, preposterous and infuriating remake of John Frankenheimer's masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate , and in a heightened state of my own personal orange alert, I'm taking a few weeks off. Before I go, here are a few thoughts to leave behind. As violent thrillers go, Collateral goes down quite nicely, stirring up hardly any acid reflux at all. For a Michael Mann film that takes place in the confined span of one night, it's more about irony, fate and character development than his usual knuckle sandwiches. This time the blood and gore are secondary, due in no small part to a tight, clever script by Stuart Beattie that is more intelligent than predictable. And considering all of the garbage Tom Cruise has dumped on us in recent years, it's a thrill just to see him in a role neither safe nor heroic, in which the phony plastic smile that turned him into Julia Roberts with gonads has all but disappeared. Yes, he can act. But he rarely bothers. This time the sweat is palpable. All good reasons why Collateral rises a few notches above the idiot level of the typical summer movie. In what looks like the beginning of another routine night in Los Angeles, a bored cab driver named Max (Jamie Foxx) picks up a pretty fare at LAX (Jada Pinkett Smith) who is a government attorney in town to prosecute a gang of high-profile operatives in a Colombian drug cartel. In the long drive to her hotel in downtown L.A., their conversation turns friendly and even slightly flirtatious. When he drops her off, she gives him her card. Max's next customer is Vincent (Tom Cruise), a sartorially splendid businessman with gray hair and a briefcase who gives the impression he's scouting real-estate deals. Vincent offers Max double his income to stick with him on his business rounds and get him back to the airport in time to make his departing flight. What the hell. Max tags along as chauffeur, but at the first address, when a body crashes into the windshield from an upstairs window, reality sets in. Vincent turns out to be a professional hit man whose "business" is the assassination of all five witnesses in that drug-trafficking trial the attorney was talking about earlier, and to his horror, Max finds himself taken hostage in his own cab as the captive driver of the getaway car. In the 10 or 12 hours of darkness that follow, the F.B.I. and LAPD close in while the corpses pile up, Max becomes an innocent accomplice and sees a part of Hollywood after midnight that he's never seen in his rear-view mirror, all attempts to escape are dashed and both men learn to depend on each other to stay alive. After his cash is gone, Vincent forces the terrified Max to assume his identity, confront the drug kingpins who don't know what he looks like and demand protection and more money. In the aftermath of a shoot-out and a near-fatal crash, Max discovers that Vincent's final victim of the night is the comely U.S. prosecutor he picked up at the beginning of this nightmare. Now he has to run through the streets of L.A. on foot to warn her, equipped only with a cell phone with a dead battery. The final chase scene is too contrived, too breathless and much too long, as though Mr. Mann suddenly decided that the movie up to this point has been quiet and studied long enough and now it's time to kick some ass. Alas, the cab driver assumes superman powers that are out of character, and the movie finally hits a sour note of skeptical discord. Still, the strengths in Collateral outnumber the flaws. Using telephoto lenses to isolate segments of the action while it unfolds, Mr. Mann builds suspense by showing several angles simultaneously. His fondness for high-tech architectural designs works perfectly in the glass and steel of L.A. At the same time, with so much action played out in the somewhat restricted interior of the cab and in the seedy rooms and alleys where the hit man earns his pay, the director's usual broad, muscle-flexing camera techniques have less space to wander around in, showing off. This doesn't mean he's lying down giving orders through a megaphone. It's not enough to show the Los Angeles freeways; Mr. Mann has to show them from 50 different angles. But in the final inning, the actors are put to better use than the technology. Mark Ruffalo and Peter Berg are totally wasted as cops in a subplot that should have ended on the cutting-room floor. The walk-on by Javier Bardem as a drug lord is a giant step backwards after his triumph in Before Night Falls . A visit between murders to the taxi driver's spunky mother in the hospital serves no purpose beyond providing yet another cameo for Irma P. Hall. But the two leads go for medals and carry home the gold. Usually relegated to comedy shtick in brainless fluff, Jamie Foxx gets a chance to stretch a little. As a lazy, unmotivated counterpart to Mr. Cruise's taut intensity, his subtlety has a nice balance. My initial puzzled reaction to the casting was why the role of the protagonist wasn't assigned to Mr. Cruise, whose fans expect him to be sympathetic and indestructible and to stand for Wheaties and the American way. But I think the movie works better with Mr. Foxx as the accidental hero and Mr. Cruise as the cold-blooded villain, who remains steadfastly unsympathetic but still finds time to be engaging and spout philosophy. Playing against image, he provides the film with its freshest and most surprising element. I still don't understand why the interminable credits insist on listing seven people who added facial wrinkles and dyed Tom Cruise's hair coffin-gray, or why it took 10 producers (count 'em!) to get this thing on the screen in the first place. In the old days, all you needed was Hal Wallis or David O. Selznick. (Today, the producers outnumber the speaking parts.) Oh, well. In Collateral , this is good for the actors, who find themselves in the almost unheard-of position of appearing in a Michael Mann movie doing more acting than the helicopters. Night Falls Loopy and laughable, The Village is another mediocre lunacy from the overrated M. Night Shyamalan, who writes and directs boring movies about the supernatural and swears the critics to secrecy about the kinds of plot twists the audience has already figured out in the first 10 minutes. Time: 1897. Place: a peculiar hamlet that looks like a cross between All Hallows Eve in Bird-in-Hand, Pa., and a Restoration theme-park pavilion at Disney World. Time stands still. The residents are vegetarians who have vowed never to venture beyond the lighted torches surrounding their wood-frame houses or enter the forbidden woods inhabited by meat-eating monsters called "Those We Don't Speak Of." In these austere surroundings, emotions are color-coded. Everyone seems to be more terrified of red ("the bad color") than of the threat that they might be perceived as lunkheaded fools when this movie finally gets to DVD. Fashion is brown. Safety is hooded mustard-yellow cloaks the color of soiled diapers. Meals are interrupted by howls in the wind that sound like a New Age rock group playing cow horns. Since the young people are bored in the daylight and there is nothing to do at night, there's a lot of in-breeding going on among the young 'uns, and I don't blame them. What these folks need is a double martini. The forces of darkness are gathering just as a new romance is surfacing between Ivy the blind psychic (fiery, Titian-tressed newcomer Bryce Dallas Howard) and Lucius the catatonic stud (Joaquin Phoenix). To make things worse, "Those We Don't Speak Of" are stalking the farms after dark, killing and shredding the pets, chasing the people into their canning cellars and leaving slashes of fire-engine-red Benjamin Moore paint on their doors. Lucius' mother (Sigourney Weaver, to whom the Alien flicks are looking better all the time) thinks it's the work of coyotes, don'tcha know. But we've seen enough Twilight Zone reruns to know better. Then the hammy, slobbering, eye-rolling village idiot (Adrien Brody) stabs Lucius into such a bloody pulp that now he's covered with "the bad color" that lures "Those We Don't Speak Of" out of the forest. As Lucius nears death, Ivy's father (William Hurt)-the local elder, schoolteacher and orator of bad lines-dispatches his blind daughter to travel through the forbidden forest to "the towns" beyond, seeking medicine that will cure her fiancé's fever. This pretentious twaddle drags on for an hour and a half without the slightest shred of fascination for "Those Who Cannot Stay Awake." All we really want to know is what lies on the other side of those thorny wooded swamps. The Ruby Red Slippers? The Yellow Brick Road? Dunsinane and the Thane of Cawdor? Glenn Miller and Amelia Earhart? By the time Ivy miraculously gropes her way through miles of monsters, mud and misery like Helen Keller having a hissy fit, and reaches a very modern highway where some very modern security cops driving jeeps are watching television, you may want to join the ranks of "Those Who Don't Care." If you don't figure out the delusional Mr. Shyamalan's latest gimmick for "Those Who Are Sworn to Secrecy," then you deserve to suffer through the punishment of watching a back-to-back marathon of The Sixth Sense , Unbreakable and Signs all over again. The acting is as hollow as it is misguided, but who can condemn the cast? With dialogue like "Do not jostle about so!" and "The world moves by love-it kneels before it in awe!", bad acting is practically de rigueur . Mr. Shyamalan is not a writer for whom words come naturally, but even with somebody else's screenplay it is doubtful that The Village would be any more convincing. Nothing ever happens in the film, and the direction is so corny that every emotion is flattened by a deadly lack of imagination or astonishment. Just in case there still may be some potential ticket-buyers gullible enough to enjoy this kind of fraud, I will dissociate from "Those Who Risk Retaliation For Telling Too Much" and sign off. All I can add is that getting taken by Mr. Shyamalan is not the fun it's cracked up to be. If you knew Bruce Willis was dead before scene 2 of The Sixth Sense , the flummery behind the identities of the townsfolk in The Village will only take half as long. It looks good, thanks to the great cinematographer Roger Deakins (the best and sometimes only memorable thing about the Coen Brothers' movies), who cuts through the fakery with images of truly arresting symmetry and creepy anxiety. Everything else can be tossed on the Hollywood Halloween bonfire for "Those We Don't Give A Damn About." You're on your own. I'm going to the beach.