In "The Last Samurai," he failed in the most basic way as a hero of battle: He simply didn't have the command to make you believe that men would willingly follow him. In the new thriller "Collateral," Cruise plays his first out-and-out bad guy, a hit man who hires Los Angeles taxi driver Jamie Foxx as his chauffeur for the dusk-to-dawn schedule of murders he has planned and then precedes to force Foxx into his schemes. It's a simple, promising premise for a quick, nasty noir that director Michael Mann inflates into one of his pieces of designer existentialism. Mann might be fooling himself that he's upsetting the audience's expectations with a daring change of pace for Tom Cruise. And not only is Cruise thoroughly nasty but, with his hair in a salt-and-pepper rinse, he's shed his classic pretty boy looks more aggressively than ever before.

It backfires, partially because it looks like a kid playing dress-up and reminds you of the perpetual callowness of Tom Cruise. But the hair and the silver-gray suit Cruise wears also appear to be intended an homage to Lee Marvin in John Boorman's "Point Blank" (1967). What was Mann thinking? When an actor lacks menace and authority, as Cruise does, the last thing you do is compare him to Lee Marvin, who was able to hold the screen often doing little apart from the soft snarl in his voice.

Better actors than Tom Cruise are put at a disadvantage when they have to play a conceit rather than a character. And -- brother! -- is Cruise's character ever a conceit. He represents the chaos that Foxx has tried to keep out of his life and, in the movie's simplistic pulpy terms, the obstacle sent to show Foxx how to be a man. That's not just a dumb idea but, as it's worked out in "Collateral," an offensive one. Jamie Foxx is so good here you resent the idea that Cruise can teach him anything. "Collateral" opens with a scene between Foxx and Jada Pinkett Smith that is one of the reasons you go to the movies. The rapport between them, the actors' rhythms and responsiveness, is so natural that you resent it when her story is dropped as Cruise comes in. But it has to be. It's embarrassing enough for Cruise to act against Foxx; acting against Foxx and Smith would wipe him off the screen.

Besides, just how inescapable are the violent vagaries of the universe if they are embodied by Tom Cruise?

"Collateral" may be the latest move in Cruise's strategy of showing himself ready to move onto mature roles. And it shows why this new stage of his career may leave him more exposed than ever. Cruise may not have a recognizable persona (ever seen a comic do a Tom Cruise impression?), but there is something that characterizes him: a lack of believable experience. What could Tom Cruise reasonably play? He seems too aware of his star status to disappear into the role of an ordinary guy. Too stiff to play comedy. Not possessed of enough reserves of self-awareness to play a man examining his own life. Cruise, it would appear, will glide into the role of elder authority figure and, like Clint Eastwood, he may become more respected, the duller he gets. (God help us if he starts directing.) But for that to work it will mean ignoring who Tom Cruise still appears to be. In the third decade of his film career, Cruise still radiates the luck of the cute boy in high school who has managed to hold on to his looks and who has yet to be tested in a way that would make him a believable adult.

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