"Man on Fire"

Denzel Washington hacks off a guy's fingers one by one and treats another guy to an explosive suppository -- and he's the hero!

By Stephanie Zacharek

Apr 23, 2004 | When a friend of mine heard how, in "Man on Fire," Denzel Washington whacks off a guy's fingers one by one and then cauterizes the stumps with a car cigarette lighter (this is before he shoves a plug filled with explosives up another guy's rectum), he said, "So I assume he's not playing the hero, right?" Wrong.

In Tony Scott's "Man on Fire," Washington plays Creasy, a bodyguard with a mysterious, troubled past that the movie never bothers to explain, and he is the hero, out to avenge the kidnapping of Pita (Dakota Fanning), the rich little squirt he's been hired to protect. All that whacking, cauterizing and shoving is happening to the bad guys. Justice is being served, which means that "Man on Fire" is, in Scott's eyes at least, a deeply moral movie.

"Man on Fire" opens with an alarming statistic about the rampancy of kidnapping in Latin America -- in other words, from the get-go it tries to fool us into thinking it's a serious movie. The picture is set, and was filmed, in Mexico City, which Scott and his crazy-legs cinematographer Paul Cameron depict as a seedy hotbed of ruthless crime and corruption.

But worse than that, it's moving around all the time: The streets jiggle, cars and people move in strange, jerky stop-motion, and everyone's faces loom alarmingly close -- Mexico City must be a very rude place, where no one respects anyone else's personal space! Or wait -- could it be the camerawork and editing? Whatever its real-life vices and virtures are, Mexico City is probably not the kind of city you want to piss off, which may explain why, at the end of "Man on Fire," just before the credits roll, the unctuously apologetic missive "A special thanks to Mexico City: A very special place" pops up. Book that honeymoon now!

But what about the rest of "Man on Fire"? This movie isn't just about a kidnapping; it is a kidnapping, and we're the hostages. The first third sets up the special friendship between the booze-sozzled, chronically depressed, suicidal Creasy and his sunny blond charge. She's a friendly tyke, and she asks him lots of questions he doesn't want to answer. When she prods him for the name of his very first girlfriend, he shoots back, a trace of humor showing beneath his rapidly melting protective exterior, "Nunya -- Nunya Business."

Next Page: Vigilantism, a fine and noble thing?

• View blog reactions