No filmmaker working today — not even well-coiffed demolitionist Michael Bay (“Bad Boys”) — glorifies machismo quite like Michael Mann (“Heat”). Hero or villain, gentleman or thug, his characters are men of rare and ruthless acumen. From the boxing ring (“Ali”) to the newsroom (“The Insider”), Mann has this thing for talent and capability that borders on the erotic. He’s like Peckinpaw with Swiss engineering.

“Collateral,” a high-revving suspense thriller made with Mann’s usual visual sensitivity and clockwork pacing, represents a departure for the filmmaker in that the hero, an L.A. cabbie named Max (Jamie Foxx), is something of a loser. Polite and professional, Max dreams of starting his own boutique limo service and taking a piece of the Hollywood lime light.

What Max lacks is spark. You get the sense that he'll never get the limo company off the ground, just as he’ll never call the beautiful, brittle U.S. attorney (Jada Pinkett Smith) who slyly leaves behind her business card after a particularly edifying cab ride.

Foxx (“Ali”) and Smith (“Woo”) are excellent together in these early moments; infused with intimacy and yearning by screenwriter Stuart Beattie (“Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl”), it’s the kind of finely crafted, meaningful sequence that could almost stand alone as a short film.

Enter Vincent, an impeccably dressed contract killer played by a droll, gray-haired Tom Cruise. Flown into town to murder five witnesses in one night, Vincent enlists Max as his private chauffeur with a wad of cash and a cock-and-bull story about a real estate deal. When one of Vincent’s victims literally lands on top of Max (in a grimly comic scene that nicely sets the tone for the rest of the movie), the hapless cabbie finds himself an unwilling accomplice as Vincent “makes the rounds.”

Cruise, with his megawatt Maverick smile and still-boyish charisma, constitutes a novel bit of against-type casting as Vincent, bringing to mind Henry Fonda in “Once Upon a Time in the West” or Robin Williams in Christopher Nolan’s “Insomnia.” Holding forth on jazz and metaphysics one moment, coolly double-tapping a victim in the chest the next, Vincent is both sociopath and cynic, a slippery charlatan with a talent for stringing together words with no essential faith in their meaning. Comparisons to Robert De Niro’s conflicted villain in “Heat” are ill-founded — Vincent is a pure nihilist; less contoured, but arguably more chilling.

Foxx, the one-time “In Living Color” comedian, gives a superbly three-dimensional performance as Max, the stifled, hard-working Everyman as decent as Vincent is depraved. At first, Vincent keeps Max from running away by handcuffing him to his steering wheel, but it’s the cabbie’s reluctance to cause additional bloodshed that ultimately prevents him from fleeing; the “collateral” of the film’s title.

Disgusted by Max’s diffidence, Vincent becomes a tutor of sorts, teaching the cabbie how to assert himself. Not a ground-breaking conceit, granted — “Collateral” carries with it a healthy whiff of “Training Day” — but it does yield some great scenes, including one in which Max is forced to take on Vincent’s persona and deliver a tongue-lashing to a Colombian drug lord (Javier Bardem of “When Night Falls”).
Coupled with Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron’s doleful, saturated cinematography — sometimes, it seems like Mann himself shed tears on the negative — the tension between Vincent and Max builds deliciously; you’re never exactly sure what kind of coldly demented things Vincent will do to achieve his goals.

At the same time, not all of the set pieces in “Collateral” are engineered to Mann’s high specifications. When Vincent's scent is picked up by an LAPD vice cop, played by Mark Ruffalo of “You Can Count On Me,” the action moves to an Asian disco in Hollywood. One suspects that the fearsome gunfight that follows is Mann’s attempt to one-up his iconic rampart shoot-out in “Heat,” but it doesn’t quite fly. The staging is messy and chaotic and the cops conveniently disappear for no reason.

Mann, a filmmaker accustomed to conducting epic symphonies, essentially confines himself to a chamber piece in “Collateral” — the plotting is unusually glib by his standards, including a bow-wrapped Hollywood finale that’s exciting, but a little too ordinary. Likewise, Cruise and Foxx — as satisfying as their individual performances are — seem to be left searching for a deeper, “Heat”-style connection that doesn’t reveal itself. The machismo is there, just not the resonance.