Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Dry-iced, slow-mo, moody, swaggering, gun-slinging, all-grey, all-out bombast? Well, Tony Scott’s got his groove back. Pity ’tis ten years since such stylistic expulsions were socially acceptable, let alone novel. At any rate, while I may harbour a vaguely tender spot for Mr. Scott’s oeuvre (True Romance, Top Gun – shut up, it’s super), Man On Fire represents the very darkest side of John Woo’s kinetic legacy, an overblown, overlong, overcooked schmaltz-fest with Napoleonic delusions of grandeur.
In between stifling yawns at the relentlessly flashy edits, one can expect mucho macho angst, and a Christian allegory so fixated on salvation it could be authored by Mel Gibson’s Free-Presbyterian equivalent. Denzel Washington is a drunken former Marine with a shady past (Clue number one – he’s mates with Christopher Walken. Clue two, he keeps asking, “Do you think we’ll be forgiven for what we’ve done?”) soaking up whiskey in Mexico City.
Following the kidnapping of the sickly-sweet rich moppet (Fanning) he’s been assigned to protect and bond with, Denzel kicks the booze, starts talking to God and embarks on an orgy of biblical revenge. In Bush-whackery vigilante style, he hacks the fingers off seedy looking chaps and treats other suspects to suppositories full of explosives. Due process? Forget it Jake, it’s Calvary.
All the generic reference points are present and correct, although played out at a crawlingly slow pace against monosyllabic exchanges and a vicious, assaulting score. Dakota’s mommy does a half-assed Searchers routine, making glassy eyes at Denzel in a manner that suggests sexual adoration or one too many coke binges. The natives are revolting in a pejorative rather than political sense. The relationship between Denzel and Dakota is disturbingly mawkish, and served to increase my yearning for Miss Fanning to transform into the next Drew Barrymore. (Having suffered Dakota’s prissy, precocious cutesyness for more films than I’d care to remember, when she hits adolescence, nothing short of a lurid tabloid tale involving PVC, artichokes and Colin Farrell will satisfy my aggrieved sense of taste.)
I may be a sucker for operatic sentimentality and ultraviolence, but Man On Fire is surely the meatheaded terminus of Hollywood action cinema’s ‘show, don’t tell’ condescension.
Somewhere, John Woo is rolling in his tragic televisual grave. Still, Tarantino loves it, so what would I know?