Bail Arteze: Stop at 51 seconds and watch this man walk towards Tom Cruise

On the streets of Los Angeles, a killer (Tom Cruise) forces an honest taxi driver (Jamie Foxx) to take him from crime to crime… Twilight and melancholic thriller broadcast tonight on Arte. Huge Michael Mann filmography.

Shooting at night like nobody’s business, he creates a masterful thriller in which Tom Cruise, in exchange for work, reveals himself as a calculating and amoral sociopath. In fact, one of the best roles of his long career.

If you pause almost at the beginning of the movie, at 51 seconds, you can see actor Jason Statham walking through the airport where Tom Cruise is arriving. At 1:03 the two bump into each other, or rather seem to bump into each other, to exchange their identical bags; Cruz, in fact, includes information about the targets he shot down:

Jason Statham is content with this brief appearance in Mann’s film as he is completely absent from the rest of the film. Believing that this “role” was more of a mini cameo than anything else, the actor even asked not to be credited.

A very tasty anecdote about him is that he is actually Frank Martin, the character he played in the Transporter saga! Cinephiles have long speculated about this possibility, without official confirmation. Even if Louis Leterrier, the director of Transporter 1 and 2, was convinced at the time that Statham’s character in Collateral was Frank Martin.

Finally, years after the film’s release in 2022, final confirmation came from none other than Collateral screenwriter Stuart Beattie. In the podcast, the so-called Collateral confessionsHe confirmed that it was indeed this character.

“Of course it’s Frank Martin from Transporter. I asked Jason about it… yes, absolutely. Yes, it’s hot. Same world… The studio will never admit it, but in my head it’s absolutely him.”