It is the depth of the Characters as brilliantly woven together by A. Fuqua that Earns a 10 from me.

Rating: 10/10 (10 August 2016)

This movie is about the war of good and evil, the transformation of the hero, Denzel, from killer to protector, and his ardent wish to be in the service of good--a redemption from his Black ops background. I believe it is the subterranean nature of this conflict that makes him an anti-hero. His past was something he describes only to Teddy: "I've done a lot of bad things in his life; things for which I am not proud." The use of violence by DW in his past is unquestionably evil and a disease from which he suffers (he is unable to sleep and dream), and from which he must find redemption; clear ref to Bush era of targeted assassinations, imprisonment and rendition of huge numbers of violent men taken to black sites--for money and never based on any evidence. Thus, he planned his death to avoid destroying his soul because he knew the things he was told to do were fundamentally evil. There was never any real basis for their death or imprisonment, nor was the Bush admin. ever able to do anything but lie about the use of violence. Thus, with violence co-opted by the "Government" for whom he worked, he is a man who has lost any faith that his "work" had, or could have, a moral basis. We meet DW in this shadowy world of dreams he reads the Old man and the Sea by Hemingway and Don Quixote, by Cervantes. And the reason he is doing this is spiritual. He keeps a connection with his wife, recently having passed, through this "dream-world" of fiction she had begun: moreover, The Old Man has no name, yet he fights "forces of nature" to be himself; Don Quixote fights for freedom in a time when his abilities are out of sync with the nature of the times. So, too, DW, learns that he is both men, thus, when he returns, he plans and executes his own death, and is symbolically reborn by destroying true evil.