Man on Fire

The revenge film has long been a movie staple, both in Hollywood and in international cinema. It’s a genre that’s produced many worthwhile films (Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River,” Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill Vols I & II,” and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “21 Grams” are a few of the more recent ones that come to mind)—“Man on Fire” is not one of them.

The screenplay was written by talented screenwriter Brian Helgeland (who, incidentally, also wrote the screenplay for “Mystic River”). The film gets into trouble by pairing a story taken from the book by macho trash novelist A. J. Quinnell (the book was previously adapted to the screen in an equally reprehensible 1987 film) with Tony Scott, director of macho trash like ‘Top Gun,” “Revenge,” “Enemy of State” and “The Last Boy Scout,” and star Denzel Washington, a Oscar-winner and a fine actor who also happens to have starred in his share of recent macho trash (“Training Day” and “Out of Time”), who plays the film’s bible-toting, alcoholic, suicidal soldier-of-fortune hero, hired to serve as on on-the-cheap bodyguard for a little white girl in Mexico City. Failing to stop a kidnap attempt, and believing the girl dead, he sets out to seek vengeance on all those involved—archetypal vigilante justice.

The film unfolds itself into puerile Bush-era fantasy, in which righteous (and possibly psychotic) Americans travel abroad and kill and maim foreigners within their own borders, but only because they (as phrase goes, “need killing”). Unfortunately, a fine cast (also featuring Christopher Walken and an underutilized Mickey Rourke) is wasted, subjugated to weak source material and Scott’s smarmy directorial style. No surprise—the result is a violent, trashy, and xenophobic film with one of the all-time worst endings in film history.

Matt Parks