Down, down, down Mexico way

Rating: 1/10 (16 August 2005)

Revisiting a terrain last explored in the unsuccessful "Revenge", Scott's latest Mexican foray looks more like a second draft of his 1990 failure than an original piece of filming. Stuffed full of sub-Peckinpah clichés, neither "Revenge" then nor "Man On Fire" now comes within a country mile of "Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia".
Reasons for this latest failure aren't difficult to pin-point, especially when set against the Garcia template. Man On Fire's screenplay is as one-dimensional as Revenge's, whilst Denzil Washington's performance is only marginally more animated than Kevin Costner's. What's even worse though is the direction: the vapid Scott is never going to be the visceral Peckinpah, so the self-indulgence that always lit Peckinpah's work  irritating yet edgy, self-destructive yet passionate  is in Scott's case, merely tedious.
That Scott (Tony, not Ridley) has long been preoccupied more with the gift-wrapping around the box than its contents is pretty much a given. Nothing wrong with that: Fellini and Antonioni were the same. But whereas they worked to invest the superficial with substance, Scott's devotion has been to achieving the reverse.
The result is achingly predictable  to the extent that it's now reached the point where any Scott movie must have a scene set on a rooftop, not because it's a narrative requirement, but because of Scott's need to film his characters from an aerobatic helicopter.
The outcome, in the lamentable "Spy Game", was dire: Berlin from the air, dizzying and vacuous. But at least the Spy Game scene opened and closed on a rooftop, whereas "Man on Fire" eschews any attempt to mask its contrivance: the dialogue actually calls for Washington to urge everyone onto the roof, and so the characters decamp from a ground floor interior to the rooftop exterior without demur, there to continue their exchange whilst Scott's helicopter captures unoriginal vistas of Mexico City.
That it's all so tired, and all so trite, may have occurred to Scott at some stage during the shoot, yet the effects work introduced to bring life to a dead script is so bungled that all that the ghosted overlays and chromatic distortions achieve is to render crucial scenes well-nigh impenetrable. So bad is the CGI that one set-piece  the destruction of a nightclub  has all the explosive impact of a small balloon, slowly deflating.
But then, deflation is very much the hallmark of "Man On Fire", where expectations are continually raised only to be left flattened. Much is made, for example, of Creasy's attempt to get Pita to react instantly to the sound of the starting gun, but after a seemingly endless lead-up to her swimming competition, the resonance that one might reasonably have expected to find in the subsequent kidnapping scene is entirely absent: guns go off, Pita runs, Pita is caught. For sheer pointlessness, this screenplay is in a class of its own.
Nor are things any better elsewhere. Despite the fact that the stereotypical corruption of a stereotypical Mexico is, in "Man On Fire", to be addressed by a special law enforcement unit (and an utterly improbable crusading journalist), the unit, and the journalist, do nothing other than follow Washington around. The script doesn't bother to argue that the freelance Creasy can achieve more than the official investigators, probably because it knows that that would be one cliché too many, and that the arch-villain of the piece is going to be extra-judicially murdered anyway in a climactic scene that Scott doesn't even bother to film.
'Climax' is in any event the wrong word here. 'Nadir' is much more like it, a bottoming out that sees what should've been the dramatic denouement occurring long before the end and a downright laughable end-title sequence that seeks to make credible the quite incredible Creasy and his foe by providing their dates of birth and death.
Like, who cares? "Man On Fire": zero rating.