Too long

Rating: 6/10 (25 November 2013)

John Creasy (Denzel Washington) is a drunk and an expert at dark ops. An old friend Paul Rayburn (Christopher Walken) brings him to Mexico City where there's a wave of kidnappings. He's hired by the Ramos family (Marc Anthony, Radha Mitchell, Dakota Fanning) as their driver and security. When the girl is kidnapped and the ransom is botched, he becomes a man on fire.
Tony Scott has all the skills of a great action director. He wants to built up Creasy's relationship with LuPita so that it becomes reasonable for him to react that way. He wants Creasy to love LuPita. I'm not opposed but it takes too long. There's got to be a better shorthand or there has to be more interesting insights. At almost 2 and a half hours, it could easily lose 30 minutes. Scott has thrown every camera tricks into the action in the 2nd half. It becomes quite mind numbing. This too could stand to be trimmed. All of it is too long for a fairly simple vengeance movie. It's really an hour and a half movie stretched out for an unnecessary extra hour.