THERE’S A PRICE TO PAY FOR KIDNAPPING LITTLE GIRLS

By A. O. Scott
The New York Times, 4/21/04

"Man on Fire," a new child-endangerment thriller starring Denzel Washington, was originally scheduled to open nationwide on Friday, but 20th Century Fox decided, rather suddenly, to push its New York and Los Angeles debut forward by two days. Perhaps the studio reasoned that it would be unfair to make moviegoers in the nation's two largest cities, their blood lust aroused by "Kill Bill: Vol. 2" and "The Punisher," wait an entire week for the next round of righteous killing.

Like those two movies, "Man on Fire," directed by Tony Scott from a script by Brian Helgeland, is about the grim duty (which is to say the gory pleasure) of vengeance. The first act, a moody, foreboding adventure in high-risk baby-sitting, exists to provide a moral and emotional pretext for the blood bath that follows. John Creasy (Mr. Washington), a veteran of some kind of too-secret-to-mention military operations, drifts down to Mexico in a depressive alcoholic haze. With the help of an old war buddy (Christopher Walken), he is hired as a bodyguard by a wealthy couple in Mexico City who worry that their young daughter, Pita (Dakota Fanning), will become the target of kidnappers.

Needless to say, she does. But first her precocious cutie-pie spunkiness softens Creasy's morose demeanor. Initially resistant to her overtures, he eventually becomes her swimming coach, homework tutor and all-around best pal, while her parents (Marc Anthony and Radha Mitchell) skulk away on mysterious trips. Mr. Washington and Ms. Fanning (who played Sean Penn's daughter in "I Am Sam") are both instinctive stereotype-smashers, and their easy, skillful rapport gives the picture's sentimental first half more credibility than it deserves.

Mr. Scott, meanwhile, with his characteristic blend of cynicism and heavy-handedness, infuses even the quietest moments with nerve-jangling dread. His fondness for intrusive, fake-stylish camera tricks — jump cuts, speeded-up montages, abrupt changes in light, color saturation and focal depth — has overwhelmed whatever story sense he once possessed.
This time, like an art student discovering, a decade too late, that it's cool to incorporate text into images, he flashes subtitles across the middle of the screen, in a variety of sizes and type faces, not only translating the Spanish dialogue but also spelling out some choice lines of English as well.

This is mystifying, but also typical of the garish, extravagant literal-mindedness that governs "A Man on Fire." Once little Pita is snatched, in slow motion and a hail of bullets, from her piano lesson, the only question is whether this will be a story of rescue or of revenge. It doesn't really matter, since the bad guys will get their grisly comeuppances in either case.

Mr. Washington, lumbering into action-hero mode, trades in his nuances for shotguns, grenade launchers and other heavy weapons as well as less explosive but nonetheless useful tools of the trade, like duct tape and a folding knife.

"He's an artist of death," says Mr. Walken, whose character has sworn off killing, "and he's about to paint his masterpiece."

And so Creasy, with minimal suspense and maximum sadism, goes after the kidnapping ring that terrorizes Mexico City. He is helped by a crusading journalist (Rachel Ticotin) and her sometime lover, the city's only honest law enforcement agent (Giancarlo Giannini). As Creasy wades into battle, images of Pita flash before our eyes, her innocent sweetness both a pointed contrast to the depravity of her abductors and a justification for their agony.

This is a time-tested movie con, but rarely has it been deployed so contemptibly. You can relish the sight of a lowlife's fingers being amputated one by one, his wounds cauterized by a dashboard cigarette lighter without guilt because, after all, he was involved in harming a child. And if you object, then you're not only some kind of wishy-washy due-process wimp, but you also probably condone the kidnapping of little girls. (Mr. Scott, for his part, shows a borderline creepy fondness for filming them in bathing suits.)

"Kill them all," Pita's mother hisses when she learns of Creasy's plan. In the same scene we learn that she has been reading his Bible, a book he consults and occasionally quotes, though it may be a different version than the one I'm familiar with. I've combed through both testaments, and I can't find the verse that seems to be Creasy's favorite — the one that says: if your enemy smites you on one cheek, rig a tube full of plastic explosive to his body, tie him to the hood of a car and light the fuse.