Needs some fat burnt off.

Rating: 5/10 (7 July 2007)

A decent but not a great film. At its core Man on Fire has a strong simple revenge/redemption storyline- pretty basic stuff we've all seen before but can work well if done right. In other words it's all about the way it's mixed together, not the actual ingredients. To a certain extent Man on Fire gets a lot of it right in terms of its recipe but in other ways it drops the ball. The movie is pleasingly gritty and doesn't pull its punches making for some strong visceral storytelling and giving the movie an edge of realism. The acting is good. I'm not generally a big fan of child actors but Dakota Fanning does a great job. Denzel Washington is good at these stoic tough man kind of roles (And not much else- he's kind of good at what he does but is basically one of those actors who is the same in everything he does). The early part of the movie with them bonding could have been truly painful given how clichéd and saccharine the material is but it is pulled of fairly well due largely to the performances by the two leads. The contrast of these scenes with the more violent thriller material later in the movie works surprisingly well, somehow managing not to come of as obvious and manipulative. However, Tony Scott's increasingly 'stylised' style of direction was very distracting and pulled me right out of the movie. Techniques such as coloured lens filters and rapid cut editing can be used to good effect if used correctly in a movie but here and in a lot of Scott's recent films such techniques are used constantly with neither rhyme nor reason. Also the movie needed to be edited on the whole a lot better. It moved far too slowly and could easily have lost at least twenty minutes- the last few scenes really dragged not because the later scenes were badly done but because by that point the movie had lost all impetus. There wasn't really enough story for 140 minutes. The whole thing seemed over-baked with the excessive running time and over-direction. I'm sure there's a better, leaner film somewhere inside Man on Fire.