Movie Review: Man on Fire

Saw Man on Fire on the weekend. Meh.

Here's the synopsis: Ex-assasin/mercenary type takes on a job as a bodyguard, for a family in Mexico. Daughter gets kidnapped. Man goes bananas, and kills everyone involved with the kidnapping. The End.

Normally, this would be the type of movie I would like. It was just done badly. Here are the two major problems I had with it:

• Because it's Denzel, they didn't want to show him as a cold-blooded killer, without giving lots of justification for it. So they spent like an hour showing his relationship with the girl. Aww! The cold-blooded killer has a heart! Isn't that touching? (Answer to rhetorical question: No. It wasn't. It just wasted a lot of time, at the beginning of the movie.)
• The director was doing really weird, distracting things with the camera. It
  1. made the movie take longer than it should have, because every scene was twice as long as it had to be, with all of the camera motion going on
  2. made it hard to follow what was going on, because you're so disctracted by the camera movements you forget to listen to the dialog

The other thing about the movie was that the screenwriter tried really hard to come up with these over the top ways of killing the bad guys, but that's pretty typical, I think.