Man on Fire (R, 2004)

Denzel Washington plays Creasy, a burnt-out hired gun. Creasy takes on a new job as bodyguard for a Pita (Dakota Fanning), the daughter of a rich man. Although he insists he is not there to be her friend and does not want to talk to her, he is soon coaching her for the big swim meet and she is naming her bear after him. When Pita is kidnapped, Creasy vows to do whatever necessary to track her kidnappers down.

Two of today's most talented and charismatic screen performers are lost in an over-big, over-loud, over-heated, over-long, over-everything mess of a story about revenge. The dialogue is clunky and pretentious. MAN ON FIRE is not willing to assume that viewers can figure anything out for themselves and pounds every point several times. A character says that Pita showed Creasy "it was all right to live again," and another responds, "And the kidnappers took that away." The violence is excessive, with too many bad guys and too many drawn-out scenes of torture, especially one elaborate set-up involving a bomb inserted into a man's body.

For a guy who is supposed to be a superstar of killing, Creasy seems rather careless about things like evidence and innocent bystanders. Even with all of the explosions and shootouts, the movie feels bloated and much too long at nearly two and a half hours. Director Tony Scott throws in a lot of tiresomely faddish tricked-up shots, using the subtitles as a part of the frame and putting a countdown to a time bomb in the corner of the screen. Reportedly, he shot three different endings for this movie. The other two have to be better than the one they decided to use, which takes a faltering script into the land of "I sat through all of this for that?"