07 · 12 · 21

MAN ON FIRE: The city in chaos

Rafael Aviña

In 1974, one of the great myths of the cinema of urban violence was undoubtedly represented by director Michael Winner's Death Wish, a work that launched Charles Bronson to stardom and which premise was the right to revenge exercised by a man when his wife and daughter were attacked with extreme brutality. The sequel was released eight years later, and between the two came a novel with a similar theme written by J.A. Quinell, which filmmaker Tony Scott tried to bring to the screen in 1987 but ended up being directed by Élie Chouraqui and starring Scott Glenn: Man on Fire. In the end, Tony Scott had to wait almost two decades to complete the Man on Fire project, a co-production between the United States, Great Britain, Switzerland and Mexico (2004), set in a chaotic, unsafe and exciting Mexico City, where an African-American decides to take justice into his own hands.

The curious thing is that, beyond the apparent Hollywood fascist discourse or the supposed transgression-aggression towards Mexico, Scott’s film touched on a neuralgic point for the inhabitants of Mexico and in particular of Mexico City at the time: the growing insecurity, the impunity of crime and the corruption and inefficiency of police institutions. Perhaps in the hands of another filmmaker, the film might be received as a typical gringo violent urban epic with cartoonish Latin American villains. However, Scott and his screenwriter Brian Helgeland managed to avoid those simple stereotypes, allowing the story to advance through twists and turns where excess and reality acquire points of disturbing balance.

From the very beginning, Man on Fire introduces the viewer to a paranoia of alarming figures in relation to kidnapping, and it does so not only through official data, but also through a distressing use of image and sound, in which TV news formats, a camera always in motion or a dirty style close to amateur video that avoids the glamour of the thriller are equally mixed in.

That is to say: it avoids slow motion, the use of blood as a decorative element, or the spectacular shots. On the contrary, Paul Cameron’s camera pretends to be out of focus, shaky and full of zooms to increase that sticky sensation of murkiness and anguish, supported by a vertiginous editing and a soundtrack that mixes tonal textures ranging from cathedral bells to the infernal noise of horns, passing through musical tracks with Linda Rostand, Claude Debussy and Carlos Santana.

An inspired Denzel Washington plays John Creasy, a hard-drinking and disenchanted ex-police officer who reads the Bible and ends up accepting the job of bodyguard for Pita Ramos (Dakota Fanning), a sensitive little girl, daughter of an American couple (Marc Anthony and Radha Mitchell) —he, of Latin origin—, who are apparently going through a difficult situation that has led them to change their residence to Mexico City. The relationship between Creasy and Pita becomes stronger and stronger, and when she is kidnapped and he is seriously injured in her defense, the film shifts the tone to dive into the horror it has been anticipating and Creasy takes the viewer on a journey through the hell that the former Mexico City had become.

Of course, Man on Fire has some extreme and implausible moments (Creasy is a bodyguard and a history and swimming tutor), explosions where bridges are blown up, the Cine Ópera in Colonia San Rafael is turned into a rave in Nezahualcóyotl. At the same time, the protagonist blows up cars and neutralizes a family of kidnappers and neighbors who might well lynch him. Nevertheless, Scott and Helgeland, the notable screenwriter of L.A. Confidential and Mystic River, put their finger on a sore spot that touches Mexico City's inhabitants in a sensitive way: that shameful daily routine of corruption, violence and impotence in which police and kidnappers are on the same side. And at the same time, they make the relationship between the girl and Creasy believable and emotional, while taking advantage of that sort of noir antihero, lonely and self-destructive, who decides to dive into the depths of a monster as precise as invisible as seen in other works such as: The Big Heat, The Kiss of Death, Point Blank or Taxi Driver.

Creasy is here an “artist of weapons and his masterpiece is to kill”, with identical doses of dignity and insanity, in a film that raised controversy at its premiere, such as that phrase that the Director of National Security says to Creasy: “He will do more justice in a weekend than you will do in 10 years”, as well as some shocking moments such as that of a wonderful Mario Zaragoza, a judicial officer who is brutally tortured by the hero, or his murderous and dishonest Mexican policemen, embodied by Jesús Ochoa, for example. All this is included in a story that turns melodrama into a matter of public morality with inclement doses of realism, irony and despair. Roberto Sosa, Carmen Salinas, Angelina Peláez, Alberto Estrella, Gerardo Taracena, Itatí Cantoral and other Mexicans participated in Man on Fire, which premiered in Mexico on August 13, 2004.

Translated by Adrik Díaz