E-Mail This Article to a Friend MAN ON FIRE

There’s a spate of revenge dramas in theaters now, and in Tony Scott’s film, Denzel Washington takes his shot at the genre. Washington’s John Creasy is a man with a military past that haunts him and drives him to drink. He washes up in Mexico City to visit fellow war buddy Rayburn (Christopher Walken), who gets him a job as the bodyguard of young Pita (the precocious Dakota Fanning). Although Washington and Fanning have a nice, relaxed rapport, Scott spends an inordinately long time setting up the friendship between Creasy and Pita, and when she’s finally, violently kidnapped, it just seems that the movie is getting longer. And Creasy’s vengeance, once he gets going, is joyless. He forgets all about making peace with his past and goes after the kidnappers, but it’s okay because they hurt little kids. His methods for extracting information are predictably brutal and contradict everything that came before. Instead of an entertaining bloodbath, we get a ponderous morality tale. (146 minutes)