BUT ENOUGH ABOUT bloody forgiveness and gory redemption. What we Americans really need more of in our movies is cold-blooded vengeance. And just in time, Hollywood has declared that April is National Revenge-Movie Month!
This is the fourth such film to be released in as many weeks, following Walking Tall, Kill Bill Vol.2 and The Punisher. The people who need avenging in these movies are invariably innocent family members, such as our fellow citizens who died in the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Those brave souls who enforce the retribution are frequently former Marines or Navy Seals, standing in for our men and women overseas. The bad guys, naturally, trade in some form of terrorism.
In Man on Fire, we have Denzel Washington as a former government operative named Creasy, who specialized in anti-terrorism (he was probably an assassin). His post-combat stress symptoms consist of those telltale Hollywood staples: drinking and not shaving.
The downtrodden Creasy makes his way to Mexico, where we learn there has been a rash of kidnappings going on. He meets up with his old war buddy Rayburn (Christopher Walken), who recommends him for a job as bodyguard for Pita, the daughter of a fairly affluent couple. The unsociable man-for-hire reluctantly agrees, but because Pita is played by the cute and spunky Dakota Fanning, he soon warms up to the assignment.
Of course, the girl gets taken. The ransom meeting gets botched, and Pita is presumed dead. Fortunately, Hollywood is not in the practice of killing off cute 10-year-old girls, so we can expect a miraculous twist near the end. In the meantime, Creasy goes on a roaring rampage of revenge which lasts, oh, about an hour out of the film's 145 minutes.
For a while, Man on Fire appears to be the best of the recent slate of payback films because it develops believable characters who we can actually care about, as opposed to the cartoons which populate the aforementioned films. But once the kidnapping occurs, it's basically a one-note killing spree, and the story just consists of the different ways in which Denzel can eliminate the bad guys.
This also lets director Tony Scott indulge in stylistic excess. When he gets out of the way of the actors, this is a fairly engaging story, but do we really need special effects on our subtitles?