Hi Aki,
Tonight was Man on Fire. Directed by Tony Scott in the most annoying manner possible. Almost unwatchable. Guaranteed to give you a headache!
Denzel Washington plays a former assassin for US special forces, now a drunk, washed-up, who is in Mexico. He takes a job as bodyguard for a cute little girl and she gets through to him in the usual Hollywood manner, so he learns to love life again. Then she is kidnapped. He is shot in the course of the kidnapping. There is ransom but the payment goes wrong and the girl is killed.
Denzel vows to find everyone responsible and kill them all. He does so in revolting and violent ways, each one different, so we can enjoy them all.
The trail leads right to the girl’s father who set it up with his lawyer to be able to collect the insurance money and then steal the ransom.
The twist is that the girl is alive after all. Denzel rescues her but must give himself to the kidnappers in exchange. But since he’s been shot about 44 times anyway and has been bleeding to death through the 5 days of his killing rampage, it’s okay, because he’s dead anyway.
Tony Scott also directed Natural Born Killers and he has mounted this one in much the same manner.
Ugh.
Mickey Rourke had a small part as a lawyer and when I saw him I knew immediately that the basic problem is that Denzel is miscast. Should be Mickey Rourke. A better actor, and one look at his face and you know this guy has seen better days. Plus with Denzel and blonde wife, blonde girl, there is a lot of racial objections. Denzel is like Sam Bojangle Robinson to Shirley temple here, just uncle tom. And he is the ‘good black man’ who dies to save the white folks. Even the ‘brown’ mexican husband must be revealed as crooked and bad and must die. The only survivors are the blonde Americans!
What crap huh?
I wonder really why Denzel chose the part. My guess is that
- he got a lot of money and
another movie he would rather have done got delayed or put back into development, and this was the first thing to come up.
(written around 3 March 2009)
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