whatever became of Tony Scott?

Rating: 6/10 (24 August 2007)

This is clearly not Tony Scott's century. Scott made some really cool movies in the 1990s; apparently around 2001, he dropped way too much LSD and his talent went blooie. Maybe he should retire until 2101 just so he can detox.
Anything good in this movie is coming out of star Denzel Washington and Brian Helgeland's script. Unfortunately Scott feels he has to shoot the whole script, so we get a half-hour at the end we don't really need - the film should really end when one of the characters (I won't say who) commits suicide to right a wrong; we don't need the "uplifting" sequence that follows.
Beyond the unnecessary final half-hour, the film is filled with equally unnecessary flashy lights and rapid-edits that distract from the real drama of the first third of the film, and water-down the potential for real action scenes in the second third.
What's needed here is direction by John Woo, not a potboiling hack-job from Tony Scott, who has clearly lost any sense of what he wants to do in film.
Oh, and just by the way, bits and pieces of this film are borrowed from an underground blaxploitation cult-film, "Bogard"/aka "Black Fist" The existing copy of that film (available on DVD) is a wretched re-edit hatchet-job, but there's enough there to indicate the power of the original - which presents acting as good as we get in Scott's film, and better direction - and with almost no budget, compared with the many millions thrown away by Scott.
You don't need a lot of money to make a good film - you need a heart and a head and the right hormones. Scott had all these, once; I wonder what became of him?