The bullet lies

Rating: Null/10 (9 August 2012)

The first half of this is much better than the second. That is because it is rooted in relationships between people that you can abstract from. You have a scarred man entering a household and upsetting balances, though he will not touch anything. You have a bright young kid eager for discovery and reaching out to people. The two of them together, in the same car, are a bit of a movie contrivance, but nonetheless manage to hit it off running and do well. I want to quote another reviewer here, who described Dakota Fanning as a girl with 'an old soul' and that is apt. She has a way of projecting emotional wisdom well past her years. Denzel Washington is outmatched.
Chekhov's rule was that once a gun is featured in a story, it has to be fired. The rule is about narrative economy. Nothing should be a spare part.
We have a gun here that does not fire (the suicide attempt), and that is transformed in the pool to a gun that inspires and sets you free. This is a clever twist that sublimates expected violence into something quite different, a more liquid , elemental exchange between souls. Water seem to be inherently cinematic, but few directors dare cut into it. Tony Scott does, and everything to do with waters is worth seeing.
But, the reason this was made at all is so that gun can be fired and kill people. We want to see things blow up - this is expertly rendered in the rave party scene as people cheering a giant fireball, an ingenious bit of referencing adrenaline junkies that we are.
So the second half is the typical revenge flick where the angel of death runs around righting wrong. It doesn't much matter that it's unbelievable in the extreme, you sort of expect that. Scott's convulsing camera fits both the man and a convulsing world of crime and poverty, so it's not that either. It usually seems like affectation because we associate the grungy look with MTV, but Scott's hands are good and cinematic.
It's that the girl has been removed from the picture, and with her any trace of intuition except what Creasy has preserved of her memory. And both Washington and the character he plays have the same limitations: they can emote and convey within a very small range. So that memory is preserved with a lot of seething anger, and gunplay, and Washington offing scum.
Bleh. The gun not firing was truth after all, truer to life.