Jamie Foxx is at his best when he lets us see a character thinking before he speaks. His comic confidence is useful; the wary listening in Collateral is what makes us keep watching.
Fi1m perspective
In Collateral (2004), Jamie Foxx gives a cab driver time to decide how much he can safely say to his passenger. Tom Cruise plays contract killer Vincent; Foxx’s Durocher has to consider what each answer might cost him. We felt anxious watching him hesitate, because he makes even a polite disagreement seem dangerous. Director Michael Mann and screenwriter Stuart Beattie give the men enough to discuss that Durocher remains involved in the conversation rather than merely enduring it. Foxx gives the better performance, and he does it without competing for attention.
The comic background helps explain how deliberately he can change his pace. He moved from stand-up and television sketch comedy into dramatic leads with Any Given Sunday (1999). Playing Ray Charles in Ray (2004) established him as a leading dramatic performer, with close physical observation central to the work. That same year’s Collateral makes a persuasive case for giving him quieter material.
Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) also benefits from his willingness to wait. As Django Freeman, Foxx spends much of the first hour watching while Christoph Waltz’s Dr King Schultz does the talking. The silence has a reason: an enslaved man cannot speak freely without risking his life, and Foxx makes us register the danger without explaining it. Waltz has the more immediately entertaining part, but Foxx’s attention keeps Django present. The film runs forty minutes too long; his reserve is not what slows it down.
In Strays (2023), he supplies the voice of Bug, a Boston terrier with more confidence than his size warrants. His rapid delivery gives Bug an authority he has done nothing to earn, and Foxx gets most of the good lines. Josh Greenbaum’s talking-dog comedy needs him: its sweetness survives longer than its small supply of repeated jokes. There is a limit to how much comic assurance can do for material that has stopped finding anything new to say. For the fuller performance, give Collateral an evening and watch Foxx when Cruise is speaking.
Biography
Jamie Foxx, born Eric Marlon Bishop, is an American actor, comedian, singer and producer. He began performing stand-up comedy in the late 1980s and achieved a breakthrough as a cast member on the sketch series In Living Color from 1991 to 1994. He subsequently created and starred in the sitcom The Jamie Foxx Show, which ran from 1996 to 2001.
Foxx gained widespread recognition for his performance as Ray Charles in the 2004 biopic Ray, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He has appeared in numerous films including Collateral (2004), Django Unchained (2012) as Django Freeman, Baby Driver (2017) and Soul (2020). In 2023 he voiced Bug in the comedy Strays.
