"Why, Tony, why?"

Rating: 5/10 (10 November 2004)

Having not really seen any other Tony Scott films than Enemy of the State, I didn't entirely know what to expect from his new revenge/vigilante action-drama, but the trailers looked so darn promising, so I thought, "what the heck... can't be all bad..." Believe me, I've learned my lesson; never judge a film by its trailer. The film is decent at best, overlong and it jerks the audience's sympathies around, without delivering any actual action. The plot is pretty good, but why does it take so ridiculously long to take off? My gosh, I was halfway through the film and almost falling asleep before something happened that wasn't just character development for Denzel Washington and Dakota Fanning's characters. When the revenge actually took place, I sat there, in the theater, attentively, and really expecting something awesome to happen. But it didn't. I waited through the rest of the film, and nothing remarkable happened. There are "action" scenes(if you can call a bunch of large explosions 'action'), but they aren't actually impressive, as they appear in the trailers. The acting is pretty good. The characters are somewhat well-written. The pacing is dreadful. The film seems to never actually take shape and be anything... first it's a character driven drama, then an action piece, then a character driven drama again... and it keeps jerking our sympathies around, until the audience don't care about anything but when the film ends. The cinematography is pretty good, but it keeps cutting and skipping and it winds up giving you a headache. Once the revenge starts, Scott overstylizes the crap out of every moment, presumably because he didn't get to do his thing before that point in the film. The ending was probably the worst piece of typical Hollywood crap I've seen for a while. What kind of supposed feel-good crap... how are we supposed to believe that? If you see this movie, you'll know exactly what I mean. In conclusion, Tony can direct action decently, but he should stay far away from character driven pieces for a while. After seeing the film, leaving the theater, thinking more and more about it, I realize that I sympathize more with the kidnappers than the main characters. That's not as much the fault of Tony Scott the director as Tony Scott the human being, though. He expects us to care about this family just because they're the main characters, while the villains in the film have it much worse than they do. Bad idea, Mr. Scott. All in all, a decent film, but not one I care to see again, and not one I would classify as 'action'. Not even partly. I recommend this only to big fans of the actors and director Tony Scott. Everyone else, smell the smoke and realize that this is a dud. 5/10