Action over Story

Rating: 4/10 (26 November 2004)

Revenge is a dish best served cold.
Well, in the case of Man on Fire, revenge is a dish that needs some explaining. The movie is more a collection of impressive special f/x explosions than a story about a man seeking revenge. There is a vague feeling in the background about a girl who was kidnapped but the story (or what there is of one) neglects this and simply continues to create more people to be killed even when you're sure that everyone who could possibly have even heard of the kidnapping is already dead.
Denzel Washington leads a wonderful cast and crew. He heads a film that should have had some level of decency based solely on the people who contributed to it. Washington stares as Creasy, a man with a violent past in the marines who takes on a job as a bodyguard for the daughter of a business-obsessed man living in Mexico. He tries to maintain a professional distance form the girl, named Pita (Dakota Fanning) but finds that he can't help being friends with her. Thus begins the first hour of Man On Fire, which looks like an explanation for the forthcoming crime. It is shot entirely at a distance and each portion is full of the expected. But in comparison with its sister half, the third act, the first hour comes off without a hitch.
When Pita is kidnapped in a flurry of gunshots and confusing swirls of the camera, the plot less, disaster movie starts and the audience that came for something with a brain can now get up and leave for the movie next door. At this time, the audience that just came from the sneak peak of _________ (insert name of big-budget, brainless action movie. Bonus points if it is a sequel) can now enter the theater. From this point on we are introduced to a range of characters from the Mexican reporter who agrees to help Washington get all the information he wants so she can write an article on him, to the numerous Mexican hit men who could have been played by one man for how interchangeable they are. Each aids in getting a shooting or being shot while telling where the next man is. The man behind this brilliant mess of a screenplay is Brian Helgeland, who has Mystic River and L.A. Confidential to his name. And the director who gets to take all the blame is Tony Scott (Top Gun). This is proof that sometimes the big budget can go to the head instead of to good use.
There are probably more gunshots, explosions and dead bodies in Man on Fire than dialogue. But half the dialogue there is should have been canned. Even the unpromted killings are more deserved than the ending that is concocted. We have to be thankful for its presence because it does end the movie, but we can't help but wish anything else had been put in its place. There isn't much more predictable than the conclusion that exists. Denzel Washington, Tony Scott and Christopher Walken fail to live up to their names and Brian Helgeland and Dakota Fanning take a step backwards in establishing theirs. This movie is a sad waste of talent that takes itself way too seriously for the joke that it is. **/*****