Garden Variety Bloodbath!

Rating: 6/10 (25 March 2010)

About half the movies I see these days start with a great premise and manage to get us involved, then they can't seem to add anything. This is, of course, the story of another man with more baggage than Samsonite who begins to turn his life around when he meets a cute young girl played by Dakota Fanning, for whom he becomes the father she's never really had. Obviously, she is going to be kidnapped and he's going to have to seek revenge (it's all on the disk packaging). I have to agree with the critics when it come to the downfall of this movie. It's one act of violence after another. Of course, these are the sleaziest people on the face of the earth. We can comfortably say they deserve what they get. But it is a calculated bloodbath with creative ways to make people suffer that puts in the realm of sadism. No matter if the child may have been brutally murdered, Denzel Washington's character can't be embraced because he is almost inhuman. Anyway, it is no more than I expected. Washington does what he can with the script and the direction, but as a human being he is really a sorry case.