The only thing that gets hit harder than the Mexican bad guys in director Tony Scott’s no-holds-barred revenge thriller is Mexican tourism. As portrayed in “Man on Fire,” our neighbor to the south isn’t the sort of place anyone, save perhaps the most twisted member of the Soprano crime family, would ever want to visit. Scott’s Mexico City is a dreary, corrupt and fantastically violent place where the children of the upper crust are being snatched seemingly every hour by ruthless kidnappers in cahoots with dirty cops.
When we meet the titular character, John Creasy (Denzel Washington), he ain’t burning, he’s just burnt out. Creasy’s ex- CIA, one of those old soldiers that richly populate this genre, whose murderous professional past has come back to haunt him one gulp of whiskey at a time (Jack Daniels scored the product placement deal here). His friend Rayburn, (the always entertaining Christopher Walken), throws the suicidal Creasy a lifeline in the form of a gig bodyguarding the daughter of a jittery Mexican industrialist played by singing sensation Marc Anthony. In little Pita (Dakota Fanning of “I Am Sam”) Creasy predictably finds a raison d’etre, so you can bet he’s mighty perturbed when — after about an hour or so of adventures in babysitting — the girl gets snatched from right under his nose by a band of abductors whose mysterious ringleader goes by the moniker, “The Voice.” While Creasy recovers from gunshot wounds, Pita is purport-edly executed by her captors in the wake of a botched rescue effort in which $10 million in ransom goes missing.
Once he’s healthy enough to get out of bed, we see that all Pita’s tenderizing was for naught as Creasy methodically exacts vengeance on anyone and everyone involved in her kidnapping. With eerie dis-passion, he shoots his way into the heart of the crime syndicate with his crosshairs always itching for “The Voice.”
“He’s an artist of death,” Rayburn tells an investigator, “and he’s about to paint his masterpiece.” And, whew, is it ever messier than anything Jackson Pollock churned out. The sadistic nature of Creasy’s handiwork — in one scene he slices off a villain’s fingers one-by-one with a pen knife — would be flat-out satiric if it weren’t for Washington’s deadly-serious delivery. Unlike the brute Washington played in “Training Day,” Creasy’s is a controlled rage, yet there’s never any mistaking our hero’s composure for a lack of ferocity. Throughout the film Scott uses lots of stylistic camera work and jumpy edits to convey disquietude, but with the way Washington burns here, the assist isn’t necessary. In “Man on Fire,” the star kills. (Rated R for language and strong violence. Running time: 142 minutes.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 23, 2004. Read the original PDF.