Many of my reviews are facetious, but “Man On Fire” (2004) is too good to deserve that. It’s also too dark for some people to like or understand. I think that says more about those people than about the movie itself. It’s beautiful and ugly, jarring and tender, bloody and ethereal. Denzel Washington, an alcoholic former (CIA?) assassin, turns up in Mexico. His paramilitary buddy, Christopher Walken, helps him get a job as a little girl’s bodyguard, setting off a story of vengeance, amorality, justice and classic movie lines. Forgiveness? That’s God’s job. Denzel’s just there to arrange the meeting.
Archives for posts with tag: Denzel Washington
Denzel Washington offers a powerful performance as a proud, intelligent black man convicted of a crime he didn’t commit in “The Hurricane” (1999). Of course, it’s not surprising, since Washington has been nailing variations of the proud, intelligent black man since “A Soldier’s Story.” It would be fair to say Washington has become something like Gary Cooper, James Stewart or John Wayne in that the characters and the man have merged to form a single icon. Sometimes it can imprison an actor. Washington’s challenge, and ours, is to keep finding fresh nuance, as he did with his boxing champ here.
When I remember “Remember the Titans” (2000), I remember it as being a lot better than it actually is. I gloss over the “based on a true story” bending of actual events into outright falsehoods, the Disneyfied melodrama, the insertion of musical scenes to help the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack sell better, and the general sports movie, big-game, big-speech schmaltziness. Yet the story of a Virginia high school overcoming an integration controversy to win a state football championship with a black head coach is still interesting enough to overcome the Hollywood treatment. Plus, it’s just fun watching Denzel be Denzel.
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