Driving Miss Pita

Rating: 7/10 (31 May 2004)

Maybe because director Tony Scott's background, this film, at times, feels and has the look of a dramatic musical video, or maybe a commercial for weapons of local destruction. The script by Brian Helgeland, the adapter of Mystic River, doesn't live to the original novel in which the movie is based on.
This tale of kidnapping and revenge gone wrong, will please a lot of people, but when one sits down to analyze the plot, a lot of things are not clearly answered.
We know that Creasy, the new body guard has a drinking problem. He likes his Jack Daniel more than he likes himself, or the young girl he is hired to protect. Gradually, he warms to Pita, who adores him instantly. When he is wounded in the kidnapping attempt, Creasy gets his act together and he is ready to kick ass. Only at that point the film comes alive.
Mr. Washington's scenes with Dakota Fanning, the precocious actress who plays Pita, are very well done. They are probably playing themselves pretending to be in a movie. Miss Fanning is an amazing girl, much older and wiser than her 9 years seem to indicate.
In the film the bad guys are Mexican. It's ironic that at the end, Mr. Scott has to dedicate the film to the wonderful and magical place that Mexico is. Sure, if I were Vicente Fox, Mexico's president, or the minister in charge of film licenses, I would have declared Mr. Scott as PNG (persona non grata) and would have made him pack up his gear and go north of the border to get the baddies, pimps and prostitutes and make his film in Hollywood spending about four or five times what the film ended up costing in Hollywood South.