Flak Magazine: Review of Man On Fire, 05.05.04

Tony Scott directs movies like a geek who pointlessly jazzes up PowerPoint presentations. The screen speeds up, slows down, flips around, wipes and floods the theater with jump and smash cuts — and, like a computer slideshow with Looney Tunes sound effects, none of it adds any meaning to the presentation. In Man on Fire, Scott even bounces the subtitles around the screen in various font sizes and styles, wiping them away and swooping them in from all angles. In fact, the movie's three acts could be distributed, bullet-point style, over about three PowerPoint frames without compromising the story.

Protagonist

Ex-Soldier
Has Rough Life (Alcoholic)
Lost Faith (But Still Reads Bible)

Redemption

Becomes Rich Family's Bodyguard
Bonds With Little Girl (Pita)
— (Shows Him Small Joys)
Finds Meaning in Life (Stops Drinking)

Revenge Necessary

Dark Past Embraced (Now in Service of Good)
Dark Angel Enacts Judgment Day
— (Bible Justifies Torture)
— (Eye for an Eye)

But the simplicity of the story doesn't just make for a mediocre movie; it's designed to exploit the audience. John Creasy (Denzel Washington) is referred by his friend Rayburn (Christopher Walken) to a bodyguard job in Mexico City watching over Pita (Dakota Fanning, who gets the Elizabeth Smart role as the little white angel). Of course she's precocious and athletically gifted and intuitive, and her innocent observations force Creasy to confront his inner demons. She cracks his stoicism by making him smile while he babysits. He helps her jump off the blocks faster at her big swim meet ("Don't flinch when the gun goes off," he says, unwittingly telegraphing the climactic scene of the movie). And how do we know that he's releasing those inner demons? Well, there's a caged bird in his room in the mansion that he lets go.

The story is indeed that cliché throughout, which is a problem for Scott. A spate of films set in Mexico over the past few years has already mapped out the country's complex social landscape. We've seen gang warfare, police corruption, bodies lying in the streets and drug smuggling, but Scott completely ignores these dynamics and asks us simply to hate child kidnappers instead. Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Steven Soderbergh and others have shown us a violent Mexico, but one rich with complex personalities and social structures. In contrast, Man on Fire asks us to give our hearts to a little rich white girl who lives in the eye of this violent storm and accept her as the embodiment of all that's good in the world. The audience, like her family, simply shuts out everything around them — somehow, her life is just worth more than everyone else's.

More disturbing is that Creasy's inner demons aren't simply released and allowed to dissipate into the Mexican smog — they're released with a vengeance. Mexico's relative lawlessness enables Creasy to terminate with extreme prejudice — without that pesky American legal system to deal with (nor all its dastardly trial lawyers and activist judges). The hero's moral clarity is never compromised, even when he's cutting off a man's fingers one-by-one. To justify his vengeance, much is made of Creasy's Bible reading, which he even manages while swigging straight from a bottle of Jack Daniels. Creasy drops Pita off at her private school and the nun's first words to him are: "Do you see the hand of God in what you do?" "I'm the sheep who got lost," he replies. Scott takes this so far that Creasy becomes the Lord's dark angel enacting judgment on Earth: "Forgiveness is between them and God," Creasy says of his targets. "My job is to arrange the meeting." In Man on Fire, this isn't just metaphor: Creasy's vengeance leads to a garishly decorated suicide, complete with a Virgin Mary, giant crucifix and dozens of candles in the background.

Most disturbingly, this morality play has been constructed by highly competent professionals: screenwriter Brian Helgeland, who adapted L.A. Confidential and Mystic River, two-time Oscar winner Washington and Scott, whose better movies include Crimson Tide and Enemy of the State. The first 75 minutes of the movie tug insistently at our heartstrings, setting us up to cheer for torture when Creasy's righteous fury is unleashed. Even Joe Don Baker's sheriff in the original Walking Tall paused to consider his actions, but Creasy goes right from the hospital into the backstreets of Mexico City to shove a homemade plastic explosive in some guy's ass. This film doesn't just advocate torture, it celebrates torture — Tony Scott jazzes it up to make it look cool, while never bothering to develop the recipients of this brutality. They are not actually humans with complex and tragic motivations for kidnapping innocent little white girls; they are simply subjects to be splattered across the Mexican landscape.

Man on Fire is just one in a series of revenge flicks dominating the American box office, most of which were conceived in the aftermath of American anger over Sept. 11, 2001, tapping into our basest desires in its wake. The fact that audiences are so ready to embrace such torture and bruality — especially in the name of religion, as it is in Man on Fire — should give us pause. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s professed to be a Christian sect; so does the more recent Aryan Nation. American fascism traditionally draws its morality from literal readings of Biblical passages that purport the "eye for an eye" mentality, or suggest that sinners deserve a worse fate for their sin. Hate, anger and violence should not be cleansed from the theaters (no Disneyfication of Hollywood is necessary), but the audience needs to insist on complex storytelling, not just watching torture for torture's sake. Such single-mindedness treads that slippery slope into fascism. With The Punisher, Kill Bill, Walking Tall, Hellboy and now Man on Fire gracing marquees, the multiplex has become something like "1984's" Two Minutes Hate — a ritualistic purging of the fearful masses' burgeoning anger. Some of the most disturbing scenes in "1984" are the nonchalance by which the people of Oceania readily accept torture as entertainment — children love to see hangings, and Winston's neighbor hates it when they nail the legs down because he likes to see them swing. They are desensitized to the Party's torture by a constant diet of ultra-violent movies; Winston writes in his diary of the previous night's "flick," in which a bomb explodes near a mother and child, "there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up into the air — and there was a lot of applause from the party seats." This scene came to mind as the audience roared with laughter when Denzel set off the ass bomb. We simply cannot allow simple-minded, ultra-violent revenge flicks, in which the audience is made to cheer extreme torture without moral contemplation, to simply be conceded as "entertainment." Moviegoers have a duty to admonish Hollywood for turning the multiplex into a Two Hours Hate, asking us to cheer the fascist aesthetic of movies like Man of Fire.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)