(no subject)
Man on Fire
An awful, irredeemable mess. Man on Fire is Tony Scott at his most incoherent. Visually, Scott's trademark excesses are here in full force: the MTV miasma is disorienting at best and nauseating at worst. It might be interesting to shoot a few scenes in a shaking, flashing, hyperkinetic style, but it's a problem when 30 percent of your film makes your audience want to throw up.
In terms of telling an interesting story, Man on Fire does even worse. The plot has no structure or focus, and seems to lurch off into strange directions whenever it actually starts picking up momentum, before veering into some kind of bloody, ugly revenge thing. Washington plays an unsympathetic cardboard cutout who's an aging wino one moment and goddamn Terminator the next, but Fanning is decent when she's not drowned out by visual diarrhea. This thing's a trainwreck.
(NONE out of five)
An awful, irredeemable mess. Man on Fire is Tony Scott at his most incoherent. Visually, Scott's trademark excesses are here in full force: the MTV miasma is disorienting at best and nauseating at worst. It might be interesting to shoot a few scenes in a shaking, flashing, hyperkinetic style, but it's a problem when 30 percent of your film makes your audience want to throw up.
In terms of telling an interesting story, Man on Fire does even worse. The plot has no structure or focus, and seems to lurch off into strange directions whenever it actually starts picking up momentum, before veering into some kind of bloody, ugly revenge thing. Washington plays an unsympathetic cardboard cutout who's an aging wino one moment and goddamn Terminator the next, but Fanning is decent when she's not drowned out by visual diarrhea. This thing's a trainwreck.
(NONE out of five)