For reasons that will become much more evident in the coming weeks, I’m reposting this DVD review of 2004’s Man on Fire, originally published, by a now-defunct outlet, upon its release to home video in the summer of 2005. To wit:

Man on Fire is one of those movies which you can use to directly trace Hollywood’s big studio tradition from past to present. When people say they don’t make movies like they used to — which is to say well intentioned, overlong and stamped with a definable, almost maverick-cowboy personality — you can always cite the comfortably bloated Man on Fire as evidence to the contrary. (Of course, all of these movies are now adapted from novels rather than original screenplay narratives, but that’s another story.)

All of the above might sound like a backhanded compliment — and it might well be — but it’s hardly meant to be flippantly dismissive, for director Tony Scott’s feverish film is as searing a reminder as any of his leading man’s last dozen movies that Denzel Washington is not only one of the best actors alive but also probably one of the top five indicators of sheer bang-for-your-buck value working today. Even in middling melodrama like John Q, Washington can coax a genuine tear with his ferocious commitment; give him something special like Training Day and he’ll blow your mind. Like the recent Out of Time, the sweaty, unrepentant Man on Fire is qualitatively somewhere in between those two films, though far less spring-loaded than the previous crowd-pleasing thriller.

Adapted from A.J. Quinell’s novel of the same name by Brian Helgeland, the story finds Washington cast as John W. Creasy, a sullen, highly trained onetime government “asset” whose star has long since faded and whose psychological battle scars have ossified into the steely disaffection a functional alcoholic subcontractor. Then a funny thing happens after Creasy’s friend Rayburn (Christopher Walken, always a breath-of-fresh-air hoot) helps land him a gig in Mexico City as a bodyguard for the precocious young Pita Ramos (Dakota Fanning) — he finds he still has a heart. When Pita gets kidnapped, Creasy sets out to paint the city red with the blood of the complicit.

Dark, jittery, self-involved and indulgent as all get-out, Man on Fire pits Creasy against both his shadow self — his darker instincts — and the cancerous institutional corruption of Mexico City. In a cinematic sub-genre of fuzzily drawn anti-heroes (everyone wants the cool points but little of the baggage), Man on Fire presents a man with a spiritual crisis of conscience, but it doesn’t ladle it on. Right out of the gate, the movie announces that in Latin America there’s one kidnapping every hour, and that 70 percent of the victims don’t survive. (The tourism board tagline virtually writes itself!) The rest of the film is pungently over-directed by Scott with a more grizzled, adult spin of the same swooping-crane excess he brought to Enemy of the State. In significant emotional ways Man on Fire also recalls the similarly flawed Spy Game; both films make correspondingly fresh and awkward use of their intertwined geopolitical density and interpersonal relationships.

DVD extras include two audio commentaries — one from Scott and another surprisingly interesting one with Helgeland, Fanning and producer Lucas Foster. For a movie that’s an over-baked 145 minutes, there are also somehow 15 deleted scenes (other expunged arcs include a fleshed-out affair between Creasy and Pita’s mother, played by Radha Mitchell, plus an alternate ending), a scene breakdown of the abduction sequence, a music video and more. The paramount extra, though, is a superlative, hour-plus making-of documentary that traces the project’s arduous development, casting, production and more. It may be nothing more than a sort of an exotically set 21st century Death Wish in much fancier duds, but Man on Fire sure gives good revenge. B (Movie) A- (Disc)