Review of Man On Fire

Introduction

Former special-forces operative Creasy (Washington), lingers in washed-up alcoholic oblivion before being given the opportunity to halt his downward spiral by becoming a bodyguard to Pita Ramos (Dakota Fanning), the young daughter of a troubled bourgeois couple (Marc Anthony and Radha Mitchell) struggling with financial difficulties and emotional displacement from living in the charred, pitiless sprawl of Mexico City. Despite his brutal past, the insular Creasy soon warms to Pita`s adolescent old-soul charms and sees a chance to regain some of his lost humanity. However, when Pita is kidnapped and apparently killed after a botched ransom hand-over, Creasy quickly reverts to type and coldly engages in a violent rampage of murder and destruction against her kidnappers, painting the turbulent streets of the capital red as he goes.

Video

As with `Spy Game`, Scott blazes the screen with distorted high-contrast colour treatments designed to give the film a dense, fragmentary hyper-realism. It`s become something of a tiresome cliché of late to utilise improvements in film processing and digital grading to endlessly tweak with the visual presentation of a film for the sake of further dubious levels of "reality", and Scott never really justifies doing so here. That said, the transfer is, as expected, top notch.

Audio

Your choice of DTS or 5.1, both are quite superb capturing the excellent sound design with astounding clarity. The range of detail utilised in the surrounds is particularly worthy of note. Another indifferent score from Harry Gregson-Williams.

Features

Available in both single and double disc versions, the 2-disc version offers a fair bevy of supplements: there`s a handsome clutch of deleted scenes featuring a deleted subplot involving an unanswered sexual frisson between Washington and Mitchell, and a ludicrously overblown alternative ending that will put a sick smile on your face, if nothing else. A behind the scenes doco is fairly extensive, and anecdotal enough to off-set it`s rather EPK tone. Tony Scott makes for a surprisingly bland host on his audio commentary, but whilst his dry stylistic explanations are dull, his admiring musings on his filmmaking contemporaries and the likes of `City of God`, are intriguing. All in all, a dedicated, if dry package, topped off, suitably, with the usual trailers and music video.

Conclusion

Whilst the nanosecond attention span presupposed by the neuron-fritzing editing tempo and crudely chaotic visual style were to be expected from a Tony Scott picture, `Man on Fire`s bleak fatalism and unrelenting, uncompromising moral futility comes as a pleasant surprise (albeit a rather grim one.) Interesting too, that Scott, that former Reaganite master of exploitation spectacles, has created a film that operates, with the graphic and merciless realism of its violence, as a bruising critique of the gratuitous and hollow retributive-vigilante subgenre that he himself has previously embraced (in 1990`s ill-conceived Kevin Costner vehicle `Revenge.`) Here he tells a potentially amoral story with considerable moral fortitude.

Even the film`s sentiment (the growing intimacy between Creasy and Pita) is offset by the growing anxiety of her abduction. Scott builds the suspense, however artificially, so effectively, that when the event finally comes, in a bruising mash of images that are the polar-opposite of most slick Hollywood action movies, it feels like a personal violation, one that injects subsequent events with an unusual and unnerving intimacy. Generally however, the plot lacks urgency, drive and at times lapses into pure implausibility. Characters are killed off in tastelessly preposterous ways, others are involved in labyrinthine abduction conspiracies that never entirely ring true and coherent characterization is often sacrificed in favour of the dubious demands of a stream-lined, though still overcomplicated plot logic. Indeed, when the film`s key twist finally arrives, the feeling is one of incongruity rather than revelation.

Still, the film is brutally satisfying thanks, largely, to some extraordinary performances: Dakota Fanning and Marc Anthony are revelatory, and Denzel delivers what is perhaps his finest performance since `Malcolm X`. What piques the film above other revenge pictures however, is the way Creasy`s gradual fall into spiritual dissolution is marked, in a kind of inexorable synchronicity, to his final deliverance. One hesitates to connote profundity to a film with more cuts than a Prodigy video in a paper-shredder, but I cannot recall another film of similar ilk that so powerfully states that as destructive and self-annihilating as Creasy`s rampage is, it is precisely through this process that he finally discovers some barren form of redemption. It`s a bracing, ethically ambiguous feat, and whilst the film is, at times, little more than an exasperating exercise in superficial pulp, its melancholic corners leave plenty to think about once Scott`s 6-frame-cut-induced migraines are just a nauseous blur.