Man on Fire (2004)

“Man on Fire” (2004) was a remake of the 1987 movie of the same name, and unrelated to the 1957 flick about something else entirely.
 
John W. Creasy (Denzel Washington) was, at no point during this movie, ensconced in flame.
He was, however, out for revenge/doing his job to get back the girl he was hired to protect.
Creasy was a down-on-his-luck gun-for-hire with a drinking problem, and Samuel Ramos (Marc Anthony) needed an inexpensive, blundering bodyguard to fill the rest of the coverage period for his kidnapping insurance policy.
Ramos and family lived in Juarez, Mexico, where kidnapping insurance was/is apparently a necessity, though it certainly seems like if you could afford both kidnapping insurance and a full-time bodyguard, you could instead use that money to uproot your family and move someplace where neither of those two things are needed.
 
8 year old Lupita Ramos (Dakota Fanning) – the  paper-white child of Caucasian Lisa (Radha Mitchell) and Latino Samuel – was clearly in need of a father figure, as her real father was always present and apparently gave her as much love and affection as she needed, except when he had to go on the occasional business trip like most parents do.
She filled that non-void by bonding with Creasy, going as far as to name her teddy bear “Creasy Bear” for reasons that never made sense as anything more than a plot device, as that wasn’t something a kid would actually do.
Creasy was a self-declared alcoholic, supposedly stemming from some vague bad thing in his past that was slightly alluded to once, then never discussed ever again. He told Samuel that his alcoholism would decrease his capabilities as a bodyguard (thus why his contract was relatively inexpensive), though appeared to be entirely unaffected by it when a shootout took place to distract Creasy from the fact that Lupita was getting kidnapped, and he managed to take down a couple of dirty cops who were involved.

The shootout took place somewhere around the first third of the movie, so he spent the other two thirds hunting down everyone who so much as considered joining the gang of kidnappers.
Like in “The Equalizer” (2014), Creasy was borderline immortal. Sure, he got shot a few times, but no matter how many goons and guards were present, Creasy racked up a staggering body count while catching any and everyone off-guard.

There was a constant, uncomfortable, unexplained sexual tension simply gushing from Lisa any time she was around Creasy. She never made a move on him, never gave an indication that she was unhappy in her marriage, but for some reason, any time they were in the same room, I expected her to jump his bones.

Paul Rayburn (Christopher Walken) existed as a character, simply to exist, to give this movie another star-power name. He did nothing useful.

Aaaaand… that’s about it. That’s all there is to say about the movie.
It was average at best, with a mildly tragic ending that it barely earned.

Except for the editing.
Sweet mercy the editing on this was bad.
This movie constantly alternated between three things: the scene, unnecessary flashbacks that added nothing to the scene, and weirdly colored camera shuddering.
Think about the intro for the “Mission Impossible” movies. Remember how they kinda jump around a bunch of times, zooming in and out and back and forth and occasionally throwing in random colors? Remember how that lasted for all of 90 seconds as the gimmicky intro, and that was it?
Well, director Tony Scott must have discovered that was his favorite cinematographic trick ever, because he used it constantly. I don’t think there was a five minute block anywhere in the movie where the camera didn’t do some stupid color shudder. It might have been acceptable during one or two fight scenes, but it was used everywhere, even during dramatic, emotional stuff.
The opening scene was a technicolor barf bag, and I was tired of the trick before we even got to the title card.
It was aggravating to watch it on my 12” iPad. I can’t imagine how frustrating it must have been to have to sit through in the theater.

There was also a misplaced epilogue, like the kind you see in “based on a true story” movies, telling what happened to a few characters.
Except that this wasn’t based on a true story, so there’s no reason for us to track what happened to anyone.
 
This was approximately 90 minutes of story stretched over 150 minutes, thanks to excessive use of special effects and a handful of completely unimportant scenes that got thrown in to pad the time.
I almost gave it a 3 Claw rating for being a not-entirely-terrible plot line, but that stupid color shuddering was so overused that I’m taking off a Claw.
“Too much of a good thing” and all that, except that it wasn’t a good thing in the first place.