"Man on Fire"

That's one of the best lines in "Man on Fire" (its script is by Brian Helgeland, of "Mystic River" fame, who adapted it from a novel by A.J. Quinnell), although that probably has something to do with the way Washington delivers it. His scenes with Fanning, an efficient little actress whose efficiency has been mistaken for talent, are at least relaxed and natural, which is more than you can say about the rest of the movie. Washington is a marvelous actor with slapdash taste when it comes to material: He's so much more enjoyable in pictures like the nicely crafted romantic thriller "Out of Time" (or in "Training Day," where he makes a terrifyingly believable heavy) than he is in this sadistic mess masquerading as a morality tale.

Scott may think he's made a movie about a man who fights (and tortures and kills) for what he believes is right. But he's really all about style, and style only. On the one hand, you want to write off a movie like "Man on Fire" quickly and scamper away as fast as you can: It's just another example of Hollywood excess designed to pack 'em in; maybe it'll be a hit, but it'll be gone soon enough, thank God; and so forth. But there's something particularly vicious and ugly about "Man on Fire," notably the way it sets up all that warm, fuzzy business between the disillusioned bodyguard and the effervescent little girl solely to justify its relentless second act, in which Scott does his damnedest to make vigilantism look like a fine and noble thing.

Scott uses the movie's violence to rev us up -- it serves no other purpose. Instead of shooting his action scenes clearly, so we can see what's going on (not that we'd necessarily want to), he relies on the editing (it's by Christian Wagner) to simulate excitement. "Man on Fire" is a Mexican jumping bean, animated by lots of visual noise including grainy processing, senseless jump cuts and, whenever a character is speaking Spanish, wriggly subtitles in a variety of typefaces, lest we get bored with a good, basic sans-serif. Scott is also damnably fond of the tight close-up. There are so many of them you can hear the actors' pores begging for mercy.

A few supporting performances open up small windows of relief here and there, dissipating some of the movie's noxious gas: Giancarlo Giannini, as a good-guy investigator, has the kind of jaunty, sexy swagger that only gets better with age. And Christopher Walken, as Creasy's wise old pal, nearly brings the house down with his brilliant, knowingly halting reading of the lines "Creasy's art is death. He's about to paint his masterpiece."

Then again, it's dispiriting to see good actors doing smart, solid work with so much unadulterated garbage swirling around them. Scott's art is also death, and we, the audience, are the ones he's jabbing at with his ruthless paintbrush. It's about time someone told him where to stick it.

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