Man on Fire
Director: Tony Scott
Year Released: 2004
Rating: 1.5
An alcoholic bodyguard (Denzel Washington) is assigned to protect a little girl (Dakota Fanning) in Latin America - the first fifty minutes build up their connection together ... so for the rest of the movie, after she's kidnapped, he can blow the crap out of people, cut off their fingers, fire off RPGs, etc. with moral impunity. Scott probably knew it was an artificial set-up so felt he had to add to it an excessive amount of style, but the visual gimmicks and insanely rapid cutting are so over-the-top they make video games and music videos look positively reserved in their approach. As with Oliver Stone's equally hyper-kinetic Natural Born Killers, it overdoses on style.
