If I hear one more Training Day impersonation I'm gonna scream. He lets things build and creates nasty tension. In the case of Man on Fire, it's actually one of Tony Scott's better efforts in terms of pacing. Man on Fire is one of several revenge/vigilante flicks, following Kill Bill, The Punisher and Walking Tall. Creasy's rampage is partly fueled because he's accused of killing two cops during the kidnapping, even though they were involved in the kidnapping. In this case, Creasy, a veteran of the military and intelligence, is taken out because he's not wearing a bulletproof vest. 2, a plot device is dependent on a newbie mistake that should not happen with a pro like this. Creasy leaves a very messy trail behind him in his search. Like Glen Oliver pointed out in his FilmForce review, it's a nice change from the usual formula, where the good guy never brings himself to kill the bad guy. Pita is kidnapped and Creasy goes on a merciless rampage to get the girl back. The time spent bonding by the two helps make what comes next work. So he works, like a coach, helping her to overcome her fear of the gun. He learns that Pita is a competitive swimmer, who is great in the pool but freezes when the gun goes off. Anyway, Creasy becomes a surrogate parent to Pita, since hers are barely there. I wonder if they realize the irony of her name. He meets with a pair of yuppies, Samuel (Marc Anthony) and Lisa (Radha Mitchell), and then their only child, Pita (Dakota Fanning). With no direction, Creasy comes to Mexico City to see his old friend Rayburn (Christopher Walken), who suggests he take work as a private bodyguard, since kidnappings for ransom are so prevalent in that part of the world. In Man on Fire, Washington plays Creasy, a retired Marine haunted by his violent past and unable to bring his life together. I'm always interested in seeing actors in roles you wouldn't expect them to play. His characters in John Q, Out of Time and now Man on Fire were the last things I would have expected him to take a few years ago. Look at the roles he's played since then. It was a facetious comment, but maybe the Oscar win did free him up to play less virtuous roles. Reportedly, he shot three different endings for this movie.I joked with a friend that if he won the Oscar, he'd be a black Hannibal Lecter in his next movie. Director Tony Scott throws in a lot of tiresomely faddish tricked-up shots, using the subtitles as a part of the frame and putting a countdown to a time bomb in the corner of the screen. Even with all of the explosions and shootouts, the movie feels bloated and much too long at nearly two and a half hours. A character says that Pita showed Creasy "it was all right to live again," and another responds, "And the kidnappers took that away." The violence is excessive, with too many bad guys and too many drawn-out scenes of torture, especially one elaborate set-up involving a bomb inserted into a man's body.įor a guy who is supposed to be a superstar of killing, Creasy seems rather careless about things like evidence and innocent bystanders. MAN ON FIRE is not willing to assume that viewers can figure anything out for themselves and pounds every point several times. Two of today's most talented and charismatic screen performers are lost in an over-big, over-loud, over-heated, over-long, over-everything mess of a story about revenge.
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