Christopher Rhoten
As the third act begins in 2004’s Man on Fire, Christopher Walken’s Ray is questioned by local police. Ray’s former colleague, Creasy, is wreaking havoc across Mexico City in the wake of a terrible tragedy. When Ray is asked to explain what Creasy is capable of, he says, “A man can be an artist… in anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasy’s art is death. He’s about to paint his masterpiece.” If you’ve seen the film even once, you’ll remember it.
With Netflix releasing a reboot of Man on Fire this month (technically another adaptation of the novel), now is as good a time as ever to reflect on the original. It was bold of director Tony Scott to call his shot so directly with that line, but it’s an accurate description. Scott built a career welding together low and high art, creating slick, commercial, sensorial battering rams crafted within an inch of their lives. Even though the high-octane editing style of Man on Fire, Domino, and Déjà Vu came relatively late in his career, he had always been a stylist: most of his movies feature bold colors, unusual editing, and kinetic camerawork.
Scott studied painting in art school and said he continued to think like a painter throughout his career. He was, of course, an artist—even the simple, propagandistic pleasures of Top Gun, which largely amount to watching beautiful people command massive machines against glowing sunsets, form a vision that remained distinct for decades until Joseph Kosinski picked up the brush.
Scott’s filmography helped popularize the “vulgar auteur” label—a useful way to credit a filmmaker’s vision while acknowledging that style doesn’t always produce a good movie. It’s a fitting description for Scott, even if the term seems to imply that a “real” auteur would never make a bad film. Man on Fire, like several of Scott’s films, is a movie only he could make, or at least, only he has made. That doesn’t mean everything about it is commendable, or especially thoughtful. Put bluntly, Man on Fire often leans more towards the “vulgar” end of the scale.
Though elevated by strong performances and an unusual bifurcated structure, it’s still a meat-and-potatoes revenge tale that, at best, overstays its welcome at a hefty two and a half hours. At worst, it’s a “slickefied, iconographic, racist, sexist, huckster version of the grimy, low-rent, pleasantly exploitative The Punisher,” in the words of the legendary Walter Chaw. For what it’s worth, I also prefer Jonathan Hensleigh’s Punisher, though the story isn’t that film’s strength either.
No, Scott’s skill lies elsewhere. Despite the story’s simplicity and reliance on stereotypes, Man on Fire endures as a classic. It helped usher in the late-2000s “competent dad” thriller cycle (further fueled by the likes of Taken), and Washington has riffed on his character here in three Equalizer films, even teaming back up with the now-adult Dakota Fanning for the third installment. Netflix wouldn’t be rolling the dice on a brand-new take, either, unless there was already a built-in fanbase.
But these “spiritual sequels” only highlight that Man on Fire remains, somewhat surprisingly, a stylistic outlier. Very few films look or feel like it. If we take “vulgar auteur” seriously, then Scott’s sweaty, speed-ramped, brutally entertaining empty calories qualify as their own kind of masterstroke. His art is entertainment, and Man on Fire is a canvas saturated with craft.
Several scenes illustrate this well, such as the haunting sequence where Creasy attempts suicide and his gun jams, elevated by the inspired choice of Linda Ronstadt’s “Blue Bayou.” The film’s duplicitous inclusion of religious iconography is also at its best here, understated and subtle. Another is the scene where Creasy steadies his RPG on the top floor of an apartment he’s commandeered, as a caged bird chirps frenetically and a couple looks on. The opening montage, the elliptical rave, and the finger-removal set to “Oye Cómo Va” also qualify. Though the legacy of Man on Fire rests very heavily on the chemistry between Denzel and Dakota Fanning (still one of the strongest adult–child pairings in all of cinema), it would be difficult to find a moment that is pedestrian by any metric.
The clearest example of Scott’s masterful manipulation is Pita’s abduction. The sequence has several distinct goals, all of which are supported by the style. First, Creasy is a man suspended between life and death—a man who’s turned to the bottle for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The erratic editing, abrupt music shifts, and aggressive crossfades don’t perfectly replicate intoxication, but they do convey his psychologically fractured state.
Second, the style reflects the setting: a sweltering, volatile Mexico City. Images flicker, frame rates fluctuate, and the camera lunges into extreme close-ups, as if the storytelling medium itself is affected by the climate. Third, the scene carries tremendous narrative weight. The first hour has shown these characters giving each other new life. We need to feel the tonal shift of Creasy’s worst nightmare coming true.
For this fork in the road, Scott uses every trick in the book to put you in the shoes of the characters. The scene is brazenly impressionistic, employing speed ramping, slow motion, hyper-saturated color, black-and-white, jarring close-ups, off-beat audio cues, on-screen subtitles that sync with the action, and repetition. To put it another way, Scott seems to light the film stock on fire—and then the editor, too, for good measure.
The scene begins with Creasy dropping Pita off for piano lessons. He sits on a park bench and relaxes with the family dog, surrounded by greenery that’s almost a little too green. Piano echoes faintly, and we also hear Pita’s teacher speaking. The camera circles Creasy, focusing on the small flower in the breast pocket of his shirt, which was given to him a scene before. We never cut inside the class, but like Creasy, we can hear it, and that’s enough for the scene to be peaceful and serene.
Pita begins playing Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” a famously pleasant but melancholic movement. Creasy watches a cop car drive by, then suddenly reverse. He notices another car, then another. We hear a bell chime (I’ll leave the interpretive work here up to you), before a dramatic shot zooms in on Creasy’s intense expression. The sound drops out as the film begins to flicker, and the editing becomes more rapid. The film alternates between shots of Creasy and the cops, but every time we cut back to Creasy, he moves in slow motion. Like the viewer, he knows something is up, but he’s still processing his environment.
Another bell. Fast, staccato drums begin to play, courtesy of composer Harry Gregson-Williams. Clair de Lune begins to work its way back into the mix, giving the events an eerie feel not unlike the suicide scene. We cut to the license plate of an approaching car, then to the driver’s face, then back to Creasy, as seen through the car window. Creasy does a 360, whirling around as the camera closes in for another close-up. According to one article, Scott would achieve several of these shots by placing Washington at one end of a merry-go-round and the camera at the other, baking the unusual spatial geometry into the take. Washington starts walking back across the street as the cops exit their vehicle in an overhead shot that helpfully reestablishes the setting and scope, just long enough to give us our bearings.
Then Pita enters the sequence, and time fractures again. We cut to Pita exiting her class, and it’s she who is now moving in slow motion. Creasy frantically calls her name as we cut back to him rapidly approaching. Back to the girl—she stops, but stays stuck at half-speed. The soundtrack begins to drone, though we can still hear the classical music swirling faintly in the mix. We hear a car honk, and the frame rate drops dramatically. Pita’s mouth drops open as she sees something out of the corner of her eye, but the shot ends abruptly.
Back to Creasy. Everything is moving much faster. The camera continues to roam around him, stressing that he is surrounded. Another shot of the face in the car. We cut to a car door opening, but we don’t know who it is until the camera shifts upwards to reveal an armed man. Back once again to Creasy, who is already drawing his gun. With the tension nearing its peak, he screams Pita’s name, and we cut back to her shocked expression. Scott inserts an extreme close-up of the cops exiting their vehicle with weapons drawn, their chatter unintelligible, and their proximity hard to judge. Creasy again—he shouts “Run,” but we don’t hear it, only see it mouthed, since Pita is oblivious.
She can hear a gunshot, of course, so Creasy raises his weapon and fires a single shot into the air. Two details stand out. First, although he’s in motion, the shot cuts via a flash of light to his hand holding the gun perfectly still, emphasizing its force and control within the chaos. Earlier in the film, Creasy trains Pita to respond to the crack of the starting gun at her swim meets—no flinching, just action. This moment echoes that lesson, an organic callback that one doesn’t need to consciously connect.
Second, this is the last time we hear Clair de Lune. The camera returns to Pita’s face for a quick moment, a blur that snaps into focus as the last few notes play in an otherwise silent mix. Once the gun fires, the camera shakes violently. The film shows Pita’s reaction from both Creasy’s perspective and a close-up—one sped up, the other slowed down. She takes off as Creasy starts firing at the men. The first half is over, and so is the idyllic peace the two have found.
The scene continues, of course, with the bulk of the more unusual effects happening even later. When Washington is wounded, the timeline jumps between the before and after multiple times, as if Creasy cannot process his injury. The camera seemingly drops from the sky in several overhead shots that zoom in on his body, like an angel looking down from heaven. Musical tracks layer on top of each other once again, and the film even briefly transitions to black-and-white before finally moving on to Creasy in the hospital.
There is, in fact, a single term that could be used to describe such filmmaking: ‘music video cinema.’ Many of these tricks originated in early 2000s music videos, especially extreme close-ups and jittery camera work. Calling these techniques unpopular would be an understatement, as they have largely disappeared from mainstream moviemaking. But there’s nothing inherently uncinematic about them. Like Fincher, Scott directed dozens of commercials and music videos, and knew that sensation can be its own sort of storytelling.
His style was further influenced by masterworks such as City of God, which served as a direct inspiration for Man on Fire. He would even hire multiple actors from that film (including Charles Paraventi and Gero Camilo) as an homage. Though the effects these films employ are sensorial first and foremost, they do intuitively portray interiority quite well.
Not every scene demands this intensity, but on rewatch, it’s striking how selectively Scott deploys it. “Tasteful” may be a stretch, but there is restraint in when he lets loose—and none at all when he actually does. By the end, the exhaustion you feel mirrors Creasy’s, which isn’t accidental.
Subsequent action films have borrowed from Man on Fire’s War on Terror-inspired nihilism, its structure, and its brutality, but rarely its style. Over the past two decades, action cinema has trended toward clarity: long takes, careful blocking, clean geography, and choreography that draws attention to itself. The messy chaos of Michael Bay and the disorienting, close-quarters claustrophobia of the Bourne series feel like they might be in the rearview mirror, replaced by the relatively straightforward presentation and subtle stylishness of a John Wick or an Extraction. (Did you know it’s been fifteen years since a Neveldine/Taylor flick?)
And yet the “vulgar auteurs” haven’t disappeared. Despite streaming being the new home for mid-tier action films, Gareth Evans, Timo Tjahjanto, Zach Snyder, David Leitch, and even George Miller continue to attack the senses in ways that don’t really resemble anything else. Even Stahelski’s juggernaut franchise has a recognizable sense of style, with its German Expressionist lighting and symbolic use of color (not to mention its long-running use of stylized subtitles, a clear nod to Man on Fire). And, fittingly, all of these filmmakers have produced some stinkers as well, which seems to be an important qualifier.
Still, none of them quite feel like Man on Fire, which is what makes it singular. Even though the concept of vulgar auteurism remains alive and well, Scott’s specific strain of it does not. The film’s ability to remain legible, and even thrive, while buried under layers upon layers of stylistic excess—thanks in part to editor Christian Wagner—is even more impressive now. Its impressionistic fervor adds to its uniqueness but also serves the narrative, replicating the protagonist’s state of mind, mapping style directly onto psychology. This approach helps make what could have been a forgettable piece of trash into something memorable, distinct, and, indeed, a consistently generous source of entertainment.
Scott was famously a thrill-seeker and an outdoorsman, but he said that filmmaking was “the most scary, dangerous thing you can do in your life.” Several factors contribute to Man on Fire’s legacy as a classic, but the risks taken behind the camera top the list. He may not have painted the Mona Lisa, but Tony Scott’s experimentation in Man on Fire feels more radical with each passing year. Maybe the question isn’t why no one has surpassed it, but why anyone would try.
