Man on Fire

Robert and I were mildly looking forward to this one. Neither of us likes Denzel, but hey, we do like action pictures and this one had some promise. Of course they showed most of the movie in the trailers for months. I literally spoke several of the lines along with the characters while we watched because of so much repetition - how sad is that.

Christopher Walken is wonderful, as always. IF you go see this one, he will be the only reason that you go and he is underused.

Dakota Fanning (I Am Sam) is the little girl and she is just amazing. This child is the most phenomenol actor.

So surrounded by talent, how could even Denzel mess up this movie?

The writing is weak - you've seen this before. No surprises here.

But the real problem - I think we need to fire the director - Tony Scott. He did Enemy of the State and surprisingly, Top Gun, but something has happened to him since then. I don't know what it is. You know what happens when you give a person a Word Processor for the first time and show them all the hundreds of font they can use? You get a page with 14 fonts on it. It looks like crap, it's unreadable. This movie looks like it's the first time some amateur got to use a camera and they tried out every single bell and whistle.

It tries to look like Traffic in places, with the yellow tint to the scene and the jumpy cut-cut-cut motion. There is so much motion to this movie that we literally got motion sick watching it. We sat very far in the back and watched the crowd squirm, move, and act obviously restless. One man left. I asked Robert if I could please go with him (out!)!

Robert said this is one of those movies made by actors who are so insecure they have to force the entire movie to be about them. Denzel and his problems are the entire focus. We don't get to understand or really know anything about the victims, the bad guys, ANYONE except Denzel. So you don't have the depth or character development and you simply don't care.

Add in constantly jumping, cutting, zooming, flashing, (do NOT go to this movie if you're epileptic - there is a strobe effect to many scenes), loud effects and music, crazy titling - these things are such a constant distraction that you lose track of the tiny bit of plot line that was running through it. I would like to say to the director - WHAT are you so afraid of? WHY don't you want us, the people who paid good money, to see your movie? WHY did you make it impossible to see most every scene, dizzying to watch, impossible to follow? Where you afraid you had NOTHING so you thought if you dressed it up enough you could pass it off as SOMETHING?

Ah, well you can strap high heels on it's feet and paint red lipstick on it's beak, wrap it in a sequined gown, but buddy, that's still a chicken. It ain't no lady. Gentlemen - the Emperor has no clothes.

It's obvious that Christopher Walken put his foot down on all this nonsense - each scene he is in the camera is unusually still and calm. NO movement - thank God. We get to see this man act. When you have a great actor, you don't need all the window dressing. You really have something.

As the lights came up we noticed two older ladies in front of us, one was wiping away tears. Robert and looked at each other and wiped a few tears away too - they were tears of that $20 we came in with but left without. *sigh*

Popcorn was pretty good (not freshly popped) - concession guys were great as always. Pueblo Tinseltown was the theater.

Rating: 2 (got an extra point simply due to Christopher Walken's appearances)