I want my two hours back

Rating: 2/10 (17 May 2005)

Once in a while i see a movie so completely and utterly pointless, so bereft of entertainment value, that i wish i could have the two hours of my life back. It's not often, but it does happen. "Man on Fire" is one of those movies.
The outlook was rather promising. Academy Award-winning Denzel Washington in the lead, a plot that sounded at least as promising as most of the things coming out of Hollywood and decent director Tony Scott at the helm. Despite all these things the movie falls completely flat. And for this there are several reasons.
Denzel Washington is a great actor in my opinion. He's not that bad in "Man on Fire" either. I would say he does his best. Acting is in fact not one of the major problems of this movie at all. Rather the complete lack of emotion is what disturbs me. The first half of the movie is a jaded Denzel working as a bodyguard for a little girl (Dakota Fanning). Her parents hired him to protect her from kidnapping, which apparently is a common thing in Mexico. The little girl is kidnapped and Denzel seriously wounded. The rest of the movie is Denzel exacting vengeance on the kidnappers in the most sadistic ways he can think of. Completely without emotion the movie shows Denzel performing one disgusting act after another, with the obvious logic that his violence is justified. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth to say the least.
Apart from the violence then? Well this movie feels in style like watching a two-hour episode of "CSI: Miami". The camera constantly zooms in, zooms out, light flashes, focus on, focus off, zoom in, flash, grain, flash. Incredibly annoying to say the least. There was obviously a rather substantial budget behind this movie, yet they completely fail to make it visually appealing or interesting.
To summarize this movie it's a classic tale of vengeance. Movies like this one have been made for a very long time with varying results. Generally i find the genre quite uninteresting, and this is a prime example of that. Seldom have i seen a movie so cold and without emotion, which is of course a bad thing considering we are meant to feel just how justified the protagonist's actions are. The end result is just one blood-filled orgy of violence filmed in a twitchy and annoying way. I want my two hours back.
I rate this 2/10 (2 instead of 1 only because of Denzel)