A punchy, intense thriller that unfortunately wastes a fair amount of its potential

Rating: 6/10 (29 April 2015)

Denzel Washington is a troubled hit-man who gradually becomes friends with the young girl who he's acting as a bodyguard for. When she's kidnapped, he literally goes around killing everyone who might have been involved to find the truth. Man on Fire, from the underrated Tony Scott, is a film of two halves. In the first half, Denzel Washington and Dakota Fanning (The girl he's looking after) form a friendship and it's touching and well played. Dakota Fanning is excellent, while Denzel Washington once again proves a master of providing compelling performances without being hammy and loud. This has some well handled character development and Washington is a character we can get behind and sympathise with. Then, Fanning gets kidnapped and the film becomes an over the top, hard hitting, brutal revenge film which is good enough, but lacks the emotional dimensions of the first half. The first half is more interesting, even though Denzel is moderately calm and it doesn't involve him killing everyone. However, isn't Denzel going into full on badass mode the premise of the movie? Thus, MOF fails to deliver on the promise of the premise.
To its credit, MOF is more emotional than many films of its type. The script is decent enough, although it lacks charisma. Throughout MOF never reaches its full potential. At first, it has some dull moments but then later on it goes overboard. Tony Scott was a good director, and he directs the film well some of the time, but even when characters are just talking or nothing is happening, MOF still looks like it was filmed inside a rave. With indulgent shaky cam, random slow motion and crazy editing which often makes the film look like a terrible hip hop music video about clubbing, you may want to bring the painkillers since this might give you a headache. It works some of the time, but it can get pretty annoying. Combined with the lack of charisma in the script, the film never hits a peak or has a proper finale either so the action can feel a bit underwhelming. Still, its intensity, punchiness and acting is to be admired, although both the audiences and critics got it wrong. 39% on Rotten Tomatoes is too low, 7.8 on IMDb is too high. This is similar to The Equalizer, which also has Denzel Washington in vigilante mode and involves a precocious child actress. This is probably a better movie, but The Equalizer is more enjoyable.
6/10