Fairly intense film for the right audience, but has some structural flaws

Rating: 8/10 (18 July 2005)

Do you like "MTV-style" editing and cinematography? If not, steer clear of Man on Fire, because visually, it's two and a half hours of non-stop "extended techniques".
The bigger question, for those of us who at least do not mind that style is whether it works for the film. It's not always clear why Man on Fire was composed in this unusual manner, but it's at least usually interesting. There are occasional elements--like the "floating subtitles"--that seem ill advised, and there are other flaws, but during a good chunk of the latter half, Man on Fire is a solid ten. For me, the film averaged out to a low eight, or a "B minus".
Although it's just implied in the film, we can tell that Creasy (Denzel Washington) and Rayburn (Christopher Walken) have known each other for a very long time. Rayburn is living in Mexico, where Man on Fire is set. He's well off. Creasy has just arrived in Mexico, and we learn, partially through implication again, that he's been basically "on the run". Apparently, Creasy and Rayburn have some dirty secrets in their past, although we never learn exactly what.
Through his Mexican contacts, Rayburn discovers that Samuel (Marc Anthony) is looking to hire a bodyguard for his wife, Lisa (Radha Mitchell), and daughter, Pita (Dakota Fanning). Creasy ends up taking the job.
Meanwhile, we've learned during the opening credits that per the film's world, at least, there is a kidnapping in Mexico about once every sixty minutes. When you put all of this together, it's pretty clear where Man on Fire is headed.
And that's one of the problems. We know that surely there's going to be at least a kidnapping attempt. Yet, director Tony Scott takes an hour just to establish his characters and set the scene. The first hour of the film tends to drag. Yes, it's nice that Scott decided to add some depth to his characters, but an hour is simply too long. There's an unofficial "rule" in screen writing that says you should arrive at your principle dilemma by about twenty-five minutes into the script. That's stretched out to sixty minutes here. Man on Fire is actually a remake of a 1987 film by the same name directed by Elie Chouraqui. That film was only ninety minutes. I'm not sure why Scott and scripter Brian Helgeland decided to extend the story so much (although I'd suspect that it was to try to incorporate more of the original novel by A.J. Quinnell), but it just wasn't a good idea.
Related to this problem, there's a "false climax" at around the two-hour mark that seems like a natural stopping point, but the story continues for another half-hour. This material is engaging enough, but except for the very ending, it seems like it would have been better for most of it to appear before the "false climax".
At any rate, structural problems aside, what makes Man on Fire work as well as it does is the gradual transformation of Creasy from a bit of a sad sack, drunk has-been to an unstoppable vengeance machine. The middle section becomes fairly brutal, and the combination of intense violence and "arty" cinematography works well.
The performances are all good to excellent. Fanning has been impressive in every film I've seen her in so far. Walken is a bit underused, but the focus is on Washington, who is somewhat in a Training Day (2001) mode, and excellent at that.
The Mexican setting is very attractive visually. For most audiences, it gives Man on Fire an almost otherworldly feel that helps sell what turns into almost superhuman abilities for Creasy. Scott also tries to make the film more believable by having a "where are they now" tag at the end. That can backfire for some viewers--my wife was impressed thinking that it was based on a true story, but actually lowered her score when she learned it wasn't, because of believability factors (she also was bothered by the same structural problems that I thought were troublesome, plus, unlike me, she often dislikes endings where not everyone walks away happy and satisfied).
As for the MTV-styled visuals, Scott's camera is almost constantly in motion. There is a lot of hand-held work, a lot of shots going in and out of focus, a lot of quick cuts, a lot of superimposition or "cross-fading", a lot of unusual film and color processing, and so on--even though I like arty cinematography a lot, and I found much to praise here, it even began to make _me_ dizzy after awhile. The visuals are oddest during the beginning, as otherwise it's fairly straightforward dramatic material. The energy of the visuals provides a very strange contrast to the deliberate pacing of the character development in the first section.
But the bottom line is that this becomes a fairly intense actioner/thriller. It's nowhere near "perfect"--you need a lot of patience and a lot of time to spare, but viewed under the right conditions by someone who doesn't mind the flashy camera-work, Man on Fire is definitely worth a viewing.