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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 35.4%
Worth A Look: 30.43%
Average: 15.53%
Pretty Bad: 8.7%
Total Crap: 9.94%
8 reviews, 113 user ratings
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| Man on Fire (2004) |
by Erik Childress
"He's At War. God Help Them All"
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Thinking over the “ancient Klingon proverb” that describes revenge as a dish best served cold, perhaps it’s not just referring to the manner in which it’s delivered. To counterbalance the more conservative who believe the best revenge is living well, the avenger is usually held accountable or made to feel guilty for stooping to the level of their evil targets. Forgive me for being a little more biblical when it comes to my own ideas of an-eye-for-an-eye, but I want to see my avenging angels bringing down all the wrath from Heaven to inflict justice on those who deserve a fate worse than death. Man On Fire was made for people like me.Adapted from the same A.J. Quinnell novel that inspired the obscure 1987 Scott Glenn thriller of the same name, this update puts Denzel Washington into the titular description with another great performance. At first his Creasy is cooled off, despondent about what he’s done for the U.S. Special Forces. He asks his best friend and former partner, Rayburn (Christopher Walken, sympathetically restrained but still great) if God will forgive them for the things they’ve done. He says “no” without blinking an eye.
Rayburn does bring Creasy a new job though. Little pay, but a cakewalk by their standards, he’s offered the chance to be the new bodyguard for the daughter of a businessman in Mexico City where the average kidnapping rate is four-a-day. (The film’s closing coda is classic.) His alcoholic pattern may have slowed down his reaction time, but despite that the parents take a shine to him and so does young Pita (Dakota Fanning, playing more than just another cutesy automoton). Her precocious, friendly self wants nothing more than to befriend her new shadow, but Creasy keeps a distance just wanting to perform what he was hired to do.
The priority for most films would be to speed-up this relationship and just get to the action. At 142 minutes, director Tony Scott (True Romance, Crimson Tide) takes his time giving due time to how the friendship develops between Pita and Creasy as well as to the battling of his own personal demons. So when she’s eventually taken (nearly an hour into the film) and efforts to retrieve her fail, we can appreciate the extreme measures that an “artist of death” like Creasy takes to “paint his masterpiece.”
Unlike the recent comic book adaptation, The Punisher (whose character’s modus operandi should be clear), Creasy doesn’t waste time and when he puts on his avenging wings WATCH OUT because he is going to PUNISH. His methods seem almost right out of a comic book and admittedly no one has accomplished more with a bullet in their chest since Kevin Kline in I Love You To Death. This may counterbalance for some the realistic edge of the first half, but will provide many with the restitution we secretly desire evildoers to succumb to. The introduction to one brilliant sequence where an on-screen timer reminds us how long one villain has until he’s gone from this world is liable to produce equal doses of laughter, horror and applause.
After all four hours of Kill Bill and the Tarantino worshippers applauding him for fleshing out his characters in Vol. 2, there’s still something to be said for straight narrative filmmaking. It wouldn’t have been out of left field for Man On Fire to open in Creasy’s hospital room, starting out his path to justice and then interrupted with constant flashbacks to reveal his days with Pita. That would have been a disservice to the material, splitting it up so that our emotions would have fractured instead of building to a crescendo of violence that we can accept without blinking that eye. If you always need to shuffle your storyline around like a puzzle to make your point, it will still never fit together as well if you do it piece-by-piece.
Tony Scott employs some creative use of subtitles (even when we understand what’s being said) to hint at clues and to hammer our sense memory with details. He does cross into Oliver Stone land too often with the shaky edits and out-of-focus camera jerks in-between scenes, but it does work for about 2/3 of the film. The ending of the film is kind of a cheat, since it brings to mind a wealth of questions we never would have thought twice about. Is it really worth the kidnapper’s trouble at the risk of the trail leading to him? Is he struck by a little piece of humanity after having a distressed phone conversation? But we still leave the theater more than satisfied.Man On Fire arrives at a time in our history where Americans are probably clamoring for a little payback. Gone is the period (hopefully) when the justice-seekers in the movies brood not before, but after blowing up people. Gone are the stays of execution that make us think twice before putting someone to death. Forget about the murky grey areas. If we know they’re guilty, they are going down. We may be uncomfortable and we may criticize but at the end of the day we want and need guys like 24’s Jack Bauer and The Punisher’s Frank Castle (the comic book, not the movie version) on that wall of justice. If anyone close to me ever became a victim, I want someone like Creasy ready to go medieval on them with a bazooka.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=9269&reviewer=198
originally posted: 04/23/04 14:50:30
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USA
21-Apr-2004 (R)
DVD: 24-May-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
05-Aug-2004
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