Film Review: Man on Fire

Man on Fire

Directed by Tony Scott

20th Century Fox

A certain populist auteur made his feature-length debut with 1983’s underappreciated The Hunger, giving world-wide audiences the distinct pleasures of an extraordinarily well-cast David Bowie as an emaciated vampire and a steamy love scene between Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve.

Since then, Tony Scott has audaciously continued to hijack mainstream film. Unlike brother Ridley, the younger Scott has consistently stamped what would otherwise be soulless B-movie fare with a surprising sense of heart, producing a distinctive brand of assured and inventive commercialism. With Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II, True Romance, Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State and Spy Game under his belt, Scott has become explosive popcorn’s answer to Tom Hanks.

Now, Scott is reunited with Tide costar Denzel Washington for the story of Creasy, an alcoholic former Special Forces operative recruited by his old friend Rayburn (Christopher Walken) to guard Pita (Dakota Fanning), the young daughter of Mexico City businessman Samuel (Latin heartthrob Marc Anthony).

Creasy and Pita quickly get over the initial awkwardness of their textbook odd-couple relationship when the lovably gruff guard notices he can help the cherubic, threatened swan’s swimming technique. Washington, meanwhile, channels his forceful yet charismatic Remember The Titans performance, berating the girl until she successfully stops flinching from the sound of the race’s starting shot. Surprisingly, Scott lavishes a substantial chunk of time on the astonishingly cute friendship—a decision which makes the audience actually care when Pita is kidnapped during a shootout with unknown assailants.

In response, Creasy begins his campaign to “do what I do best,” as he puts it to Pita’s mother: “Kill everyone who profited from this action in any way.” And he does, with impressive sadism. It becomes a running joke that everyone Creasy reaches employs the same weak defense, virtually verbatim—“I’m just a professional doing my job.” Creasy, though, is the only one who is a real professional, the kind of hero who can inventively fashion an explosive suppository and staunch severed-finger wounds with an automobile cigarette lighter. (Walken, with the not-quite-provoked manic intensity that has made him a cult figure, enthusiastically tells the film’s lone honest cop that Washington is “an artist of violence who is about to paint his masterpiece” before one such scene.) Still, he is only cruel when it is necessary to draw out the next line in the kidnapping chain; the kidnappers’ villainy is constant, conveniently making sure we can continuously support Creasy’s quest.

A moderate audience’s sympathies don’t always stay with the vengeance seeker. Witness Man screenwriter Brian Helgeland’s directorial debut, Payback, which quickly degenerated into brutality for what seemed to be brutality’s own sake. The difference is in the humanity; Payback was a perfect fit for star Mel Gibson, the master of sadomasochistic cinema, but Scott wants us to care.

And it is the need to connect to the audience that makes Man a more successful tragedy than Helgeland’s Mystic River script. Scott’s actors play their melodramatic roles with a grace that Sean Penn did not achieve in that film’s overwrought dinner-theater performance. This decision gives what is essentially a well-written straight-to-HBO Rutger Hauer flick a core that Mystic never achieved. Can you imagine what Christopher Walken would have been in Eastwood’s hands? Here, he underplays his role. Let me repeat that: Walken underplays a role. The last director to manage that tremendous feat was Steven Spielberg in Catch Me if You Can. I guess Walken felt he owed his True Romance director something.

Even Mickey Rourke’s guest appearance is restrained. This is a guy who briefly quit acting to become a professional boxer. (Perhaps demonstrating Scott’s need for a modicum of Top Gun pizzazz, he has Rourke’s character killed by a mysterious samurai sword late in the film.)

Scott continues his devotion, first professed in Enemy of the State and Spy Game, to jittery editing and cinematography that conjures an unholy mix of Traffic-era Steven Soderbergh and Mix Master Mike. The effect is to reflect the grime of Mexico City and Creasy’s deep ambivalence about his profession, but it often feels like a put-on concession to the MTV generation.

It is only the most noticeable evidence of the film’s flaws. Rayburn is never defined as a character. His story is hinted at but never shown, perhaps left on the cutting-room floor.

The kidnapping plot is incoherent. Somehow it involves a shadowy secret agency of corrupt cops and villainous baby’s mamas, but their interaction with the actual kidnapping is never clear. Pita’s mother has hysterics that belong in a Mystic River, not this profoundly reserved effort: she quickly becomes no more than annoying. Why is unfazeable do-gooder journalist Mariana (Rachel Ticotin) so well-connected, and why don’t some of the uber-powerful villains follow through on their threats against her? Why is Scott Free productions fixture Giancarlo Giannini so damn cool as Mariana’s bed-buddy / uncorruptable, play-by-his-own-rules Mexican G-Man?

In the end, however, certain flaws are inherent in every entry in the B-revenge genre—a modern standard for which was set by Scott with 1990’s aptly-titled Revenge—and even this craftsman cannot avoid them. Think about it this way: Marc Anthony appears in Man looking like an extra from Wall Street, but that cannot hide his essential sensual smoulder from coming through. Tony Scott’s latest effort may have as many gaps as the CIA’s last intelligence report, but the man who brought the world Ice Man still knows how to smoulder.