Revenge thriller with good build up and great potential...but it might have been nice to be allowed to SEE the revenge

Rating: Null/10 (26 October 2004)

Man On Fire is a particularly infuriating film because it starts out so well. Admittedly it's basically a pretty unoriginal revenge thriller rather unnecessarily stretched out to two and a half hours. However, for the first hour the film works well. The pace is leisurely but the tension does build up, Denzel Washington makes his clichéd hero-trying-to-drown-his-sorrows-in-drink a reasonably rounded character, and his growing relationship with young Dakota Fanning is well handled, quite affecting while avoiding mawkishness. Eventually she is kidnapped and killed, and, as Washington decided to kick ass big time, one thinks "yes, this is where the film is going to kick off". After all, roaring rampages of revenge are always more powerful after a long build up so we care more.
Except here we don't. One of the most annoying "fads" in current cinema is the MTV style, a-cut-every-second style of film-making. Admittedly, there is sometimes nothing more boring than when a camera is just pointed at the actors, but Man On Fire goes to the other extreme and takes it all a stage further, in fact sometimes director Tony Scott seems to decide not to show us what is going on at all. Two potentially strong scenes, a shoot out in a street and Washington torturing a man by cutting off some fingers, are completely ruined by excessive editing and alterations to the film stock whilst others are considerably weakened. Washington wastes villains and often in nasty ways, but we probably see less than 50% of the action. This means that when the end comes, far from being moved, we just don't really care.
What a shame. Most aspects of this film are solid if hardly great. Funny how one bad aspect of a film can sometimes be responsible for almost completely ruining it.