Sometimes film trailers reveal more about the real nature of a film than they're meant to. The trailers for Man on Fire show a scene in which crazy ol' Christopher Walken describes the film's main character, Creasy (Denzel Washington), saying, "Creasy's art is death, and he's about to paint his masterpiece." In this great line lies the interesting premise: Creasy has dedicated his entire life to bloodshed and is now prepared to execute his most fully realized piece to date. But after seeing Man on Fire, it's clear that Walken is not actually talking about the film's main character, or death. What he's really talking about is director Tony Scott, who is the true artist, and Man on Fire is his masterpiece of schlock.
Man on Fire is a crescendo of bad filmmaking whose roots can be traced to the '80s power ballad Top Gun. The movie's great accomplishmentis that it exposes his older films for what they really are: sketches and harbingers of the fully realized fluff achieved in this film.
The beginning of the film shows a good deal of promise. The brooding Creasy, a former CIA special forces operative with a drinking problem, gets hired by a wealthy Mexico City couple to protect their daughter Pita (Dakota Fanning) from a cartel of kidnappers that have been targeting the city's wealthy elite. In the tradition of tough-guy-with-a-soft-heart action movies like Man on Fire, Creasy refuses to befriend Pita at first, but after a series of heart-warming moments, they become inseparable companions. As formulaic as these scenes are, they are pretty effective, due entirely to the strength of Washington's and Fanning's performances, and they almost transcend the hackneyed "happy times before everything goes wrong" scenes that fill the first half hour of most action movies.
Then, of course, everything goes wrong: Pita gets kidnapped, Creasy gets riddled with bullets, the ransom drop is botched and everything goes down hill. At this moment, you can sense the sigh with relief in the plot - it has finished its necessary first act and Scott is now allowed to descend into a manic orgy of action-revenge carnage, unremarkable in almost every way except for its similarity to the plotline of most Steven Seagal movies.
The film's first act does have a seed of genuine potential, but as soon as Dakota Fanning leaves the screen, the rest of the film falls into a numbingly repetitive pattern of finding bad guy, torturing the bad guy and extracting information about higher-level bad guys, then finding those new bad guys, etc. This might be a sustainable exercise if the film was kept to the standard action-movie length of 90 minutes, but Man on Fire is dragged out to nearly two and half hours.
The most frustrating aspect of Man on Fire - and this is what really qualifies it as high schlock - is its total misappropriation and waste of good talent. The screenplay was penned by Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential, Mystic River), Denzel Washington and Dakota Fanning both provide confident performances, and Christopher Walken and Mickey Rourke both appear in supporting roles, though judging by Rourke's performance it could have easily been a no-name actor wearing a look-alike mask. Even the location of Mexico City is a pretty compelling choice, and the set direction and art design are very well done.
The greatest fault of the film is in Scott's style of directing and editing. It completely overwhelms the formulaic, yet well-executed, subject matter. The visual style of the film is a non-stop barrage of heavily filtered, overexposed film stock, with quick cuts executed all too rapidly. The edits feel random, and succeed only in distracting the viewer from the narrative of the story. In addition to the infuriating cinematography and editing in the film, the portrayal of violence is so sadistic that it is surprising the film was released without earning an NC-17 rating.
It's one thing when a lousy, morally reprehensible movie is made on a shoestring budget with D-list actors. The movie might be awful, but at least it doesn't cost a fortune. Man on Fire obviously cost quite a bit of money to make. They bought what should have been all the right elements - the writer, the actors, the props and the sets - yet in the end, all they have to show for it is a bloated, soulless, self-indulgent parade of violence. For that reason, Tony Scott has painted his ignominious masterpiece, an infinitely expensive film that almost totally fails to engage the viewer.
