Steven Spielberg: Catch Me if You Can

The brilliant opening credits of Catch Me if You Can encapsulate the spirit and tenor of the film to follow with magnificent conciseness. Animated with the use of rubber stamps (an ingenious technique that only further ties the credits to the content of the actual movie), Olivier Kuntzel's and Florence Deygas' title design renders Spielberg's most delicate film into a brief summary of plot and direction. The credits have a tremendous flow and momentum to them, the words forming in elegant typography, lines always continuing until they form the next credit. The animation has the same unceasing inertia, with the frame shifting horizontally and vertically as the stamped silhouette of Frank William Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) evades FBI Agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks). Buoyed by John Williams' own '60s throwback, a light but still dramatic score, these first minutes are so memorable that I recalled them instantly after not seeing the film in years, while so much of the actual story had faded.

Watching Catch Me if You Can again, however, made me wonder how I'd let it sink in my estimation. It's an undeniably light work, perhaps Spielberg's lightest since The Sugarland Express, his first theatrical film. But it's also the first of his movies since then to truly work as a comedy, to still operate on the formal, large scale of his typical work but also generate character-driven, intimate humor woefully absent in, say, 1941. So delicate is Spielberg's craft here, so unlike his typical populist stylist of overwhelming spectacle, that it can be easy to miss that the film, like The Sugarland Express, is actually a drama. In fact, it may be the most elegant summary of some of Spielberg's pet themes of childhood innocence and distanced parenthood. That it is so funny only reveals frustratingly unexplored depths to Spielberg's storytelling capacity.

We meet Frank Abagnale Jr. as a guest on a game show in the '70s. Caught, even reformed, he is on television acknowledged for what he truly is: one of the greatest con-men of the 20th century. Spielberg then briefly flashes back to his capture in France, where Hanratty finally confronts his biggest target and betrays a clear fondness for the young man beneath his taunting. By starting with these two scenes before reverting back to a mostly linear tour through Abagnale's life, Spielberg gives away his hand. The question of the cat-and-mouse game between FBI agent and confidence man is answered before anyone has even begun to ask it. This flashback betrays the director's motives: as charming and clever as so many of the reversals Abagnale routinely performs on Hanratty are, they are not the point of the expertly plotted caper.

This is only made clearer when Spielberg reverts to Abagnale's youth. Leonardo DiCaprio, though using roles like this to establish a serious and adult persona, has never looked more fresh-faced than the boy Frank. Abagnale has the perfect postwar adolescence: his respected father, Frank Sr. (Christopher Walken) sends him to private school and continues to romance his wife (Nathalie Baye), whom he met while serving in France. DiCaprio wears a boyish smile that takes years off his already cherubic face, and he regards his father's induction into the local Rotary Club's lifetime membership as something approaching beatification. To see this kid, so naïve and joyous, juxtaposed so closely with the rotting but still cunning knave trying to escape from a French prison creates a cognitive difference.

With considerable speed, however, Spielberg begins to bridge the two beings into the same conflicted son. Frank Sr. exhibits some erratic, even dishonest behavior with bankers, and his mutterings about the I.R.S. knocking on his door coincide with shots of the Abagnales' fortunes reversing. To keep the feds at bay, the family must sell their home and move into a smaller place, as well as getting rid of the car. The parents must also send their son to public school, where he goes the first day in his old uniform, tacitly attempting to keep some form of familiarity in the upheaval (his behavior here mirrors that of Max Fischer in Rushmore after his expulsion from the titular academy).

But it is this act that helps bring out the start of Abagnale's gift for tricking people. Shoved by a bully, he walks into class with that kid and, when some mistake him for the substitute teacher, he plays along so that he might get his revenge. As the start of an epic criminal career, it's so innocuous as to be no less bewildering than the sinless child previously seen. But the childish quality of Abagnale's trick reveals a crucial aspect of his crimes that are hammered home by his subsequent discovery of his mother's infidelity and his parents' divorce.

Faced with having to choose between his separating parents, Abagnale somehow seems to grow even younger and more innocent as cross-cut frames of a sympathetic but impatient lawyer urging the boy to sign meet shots of the young man desperately fleeing the situation, running so hard that the formal elegance of the film to that point is instantly upturned in favor of handheld, momentum-filled shots that carry all the frantic energy of Spielberg's handheld footage in Saving Private Ryan. Abagnale's subsequent career of confidence tricks, of check fraud slowly blossoming into full-on impersonations of pilots, doctors and attorneys, comes back to this single moment, a despairing child fleeing reality for the safety of his own illusions.

In that sense, the Spielberg film with which Catch Me if You Can shares the most is Hook. They even share something of a common shot: the honoring of the beloved and respected parental figure in a ceremony that is both modest and overwhelming for what it means to the principal characters in attendance. There's more humor in Frank Sr.'s speech about the two mice than the resonant beauty of orphans standing for Granny Wendy, but that early shot acts a clue to this film's fairy tale origins. But Catch Me if You Can succeeds where Hook so often falls flat as a story of reality and fantasy colliding. Spielberg's Pan is a realist being sucked back into his fantasy world against his will, creating an awkward struggle in which regression is bizarrely proffered as a positive goal. Abagnale's story progresses the proper way, in which a fantasist resists the constant tug of the world around him as he must continuously up the ante of his imagination to outpace the truth.

To further emphasize this, Spielberg took the biggest creative license with Abagnale's life to stage two invented reunions between father and son. These scenes beautifully capture the son's futile attempts to remold everything back into the life he remembers. Having amassed a pile of money through check fraud gotten over by the respect given to him as a Pan-Am "pilot," Abagnale treats Frank Sr. to lavish lunches and extravagant gifts that the father, still hounded by the I.R.S., must turn down. But the son persists, and he speaks to his dad about going to pick up mom as if nothing happened, as if she didn't already remarry and Frank Sr. wasn't hollowed out from the blows of his career and family imploding at the same time. Abagnale is so caught up in his lies, and still so childish, that he cannot see the problem of giving his audited father mountains of cash he himself obtained illegally. With his father, he really is a pilot, just trying to give back to his parents who are going through a rough spot but will come through it all right.

Walken shines in these scenes. Every time he returns to the screen, Frank Sr. is more bitter, more heartbroken, but his self-pity never stops him from seeing right through his boy. In their first reunion, Walken has a smirk on his face that betrays all he knows from the moment he sets eyes on Junior. Walken puts an edge into his last few lines with DiCaprio, and when Frank Sr. parts with a cryptically whispered, "The rest of us really are suckers," the depth of his son's cluelessness is made plain by his confusion. His dad just shattered the illusion and Abagnale doesn't even know it. But when the two later meet, after Frank Sr. is reduced to working for the government he so virulently hates, the father's knowledge of his son's true activities comes out in the open when the man actually encourages his kid to continue his antics, so thrilled that his boy is giving the government a hard time. Ironically, it is Abagnale's true identity as a criminal that makes his father the happiest, but Abagnale still cannot break out of his fantasy. Frank Sr. is by this point completely broken, and all he has left in life is the brief thrill of vicarious revenge. But his son cannot see that, for he cannot even see himself.

But reality breaks through Abagnale's barriers despite his best efforts, and Spielberg further clarifies his placement of the opening flashbacks by presenting an alternate bond between Abagnale and Hanratty. The latter works in the bank fraud division he helped create, and he attaches himself to Abagnale's extensive paper trail with solemn zeal. Hanks plays Hanratty almost totally without mirth, albeit with a touch of self-awareness. (I'd give anything to have been in an audience when he replies to his partners' complaints of his humorlessness with a vulgar knock-knock joke that could bring the house down.) Hanratty gets so caught up in Abagnale's case that he himself risks folly by disappearing solely into his work. He's chasing the man beneath all those aliases, and when the two meet for the first time, Abagnale manages to fool Hanratty into letting him go. Later, the boy recounts to the agent what his dad told him about why the Yankees win, that everyone else is "looking at the pinstripes." For a time, Hanratty is as much a part of the fantasy world Frank Jr. constructs as the various occupations.

Yet Hanratty offers clarity to Abagnale, clarity both unwanted and desired. He represents hard truth in the form of the law, unable to nab the con man but nevertheless capable of ruffling his feathers. At one point in the film, Abagnale has fallen so far into his own construct that he attempts to marry a girl (Amy Adams) who thinks him one of his aliases. This essentially traps him, but he doesn't realize it until Hanratty's team tracks him down, demolishing Abagnale's house of cards and gradually setting the boy on a path to collapse. Incidentally, it's a collapse that, in a mirror of Peter Pan in the flashback of Hook, occurs when he sees his mom happy with another child. But where the young Pan fully divorced from reality to retreat to Neverland, Abagnale must finally come to terms with that reality.

On the flip side, Hanratty also stands for the normalcy Abagnale genuinely wants from all his high-flying escapades. Like Abagnale's father, Hanratty is divorced, only it was dedication to his job, not an illegal undermining of it, that splintered his family. Hanratty is also the one to see the real Abagnale, again in a foil of the boy's father: Frank Sr. sees vengeance for his torment at the hands of feds, while Carl sees the child just wanting to be loved. When Hanratty receives the first of his Christmas calls from Abagnale, he rightly deduces that the boy is calling because he has no one else to talk to, but his victorious laughing soon gives way to a clear empathy for the kid. Abagnale's genuine regret for the hassle he causes Hanratty feels like that of a disobedient but faithful child apologizing for letting down his father. All the bravado in DiCaprio's voice dies in those phone calls, his guarded but somber tone suggests that he's growing tired of all the games too.

As with last year's War Horse, Catch Me if You Can represents a deliciously old-school Spielberg in the midst of his literally bleached-out late career. Janusz Kaminski's cinematography is rich in color, with classically arranged shots offering sumptuous detail as Spielberg moves swiftly through Abagnale's fast-paced life, a speed that apparently matched that of production. Though it lacks the gravitas of so many of Spielberg's late work, the film nevertheless features perhaps the best of his exuberant energy, which might explain how he could average three shooting locations a production day and still wind up with such an immaculately framed picture. To return to The Sugarland Express, Spielberg's light but poignant 2002 feature forms something of a bookend with his first theatrical release. They are both fleet-footed exercises in style that reveal their maker's deep preoccupations, but where The Sugarland Express ends with confusion and sadness, Catch Me if You Can shows its characters moving on, coping with their failures and even finding contentment.

Though filmed and released after Minority Report, Catch Me if You Can feels as if it should come before it, forming a tighter bond with A.I.'s mature, insightful thoughts on childhood and humanity and leaving Spielberg's morally probing tech thriller to the post-9/11 films to follow. But regardless of its release date, Catch Me if You Can may be the final word on Spielberg's obsession with innocence, childhood and family. That's not to say he hasn't broached the subject since, but certainly nothing he's done since has even neared the intensity and depth with which it has reckoned with the director's most personal themes.

Domino

Tony Scott's Domino is simultaneously one of the sloppiest yet most fascinating American mainstream films made in the last 20 years. It combines the slapdash abilities of two of the most off-the-wall filmmakers working today into a hodgepodge that displays the best and worst of both. It contains Richard Kelly's swirling eddy of jumbled, half-baked ideas as filtered though Tony Scott's postmodern pseudo-poetry. The entire film has, as someone in the film says of a television executive, "the attention span of a ferret on crystal meth." And yet, when the film clicks, it manages to push the most outlandish elements of Kelly and Scott's élans to their extremes, to the point that the whole thing goes collapses in on itself, a red giant becoming a denser white dwarf. Somehow, it works, precisely because it doesn't.

Perhaps the only bit of honesty in the whole damn thing is the opening disclaimer that flashes, "Based on a true story" on the screen before another bit of text, almost as an afterthought, fades in: "Sort of." From the start, voiceovers and shots add exposition even as they bewilder. Scott loops sections of Keira Knightley's dialogue with his layered shots, starting in medias res not only within the narrative but within the background Domino Harvey (Knightley) provides about her life and her missions as a bounty hunter. Every so often, the film folds back in on itself, filling in details of the plot, some of which rearrange seemingly resolved stories with new perspective.

Scott cast Knightley in the role of Harvey, a model-turned-bounty-hunter, after seeing her in the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, but there wasn't much in The Curse of the Black Pearl to hint at the part she plays here. Domino represents the opposite of the majority of Knightley's other roles, an anti-glamor punk who turned to busting noses to vent her Soho and Beverley Hills-injected ennui. She works in a team with Ed Moesby (Mickey Rourke), the greatest bounty hunter in L.A., and Choco (Édgar Ramírez), a street urchin getting out his own psychopathic rage through chasing down bail skippers. Together, they break down doors, crack heads and generally confuse everyone who sees two juiced-up apes with a lithe, petite pixie in tow, a sight all the more confounding in that the lumbering, more experienced masses seem to follow her lead.

Domino unfolds in flashback as the protagonist recounts a horrifically botched job to an FBI psychologist (Lucy Liu). The first action we see is a shootout in a mobile home involving a locked freezer filled with money and a decoder ring on a severed arm, and just what the hell just happened is not fully explained for another 80 minutes. This is one of the more normal sequences of the film. Kelly went hog-wild with his treatment, connecting Domino's early life with her bounty hunting career by having her first assignment end with a lap dance to diffuse a tense situation (natch).

Scott, meanwhile, takes his leap forward with Man on Fire and makes it look like the most aesthetically conventional action movie around. The framing device setting up a flashback leads to a narrative that flashes back, forward and seemingly sideways at will, duplicating the image literally with Scott's production effects and recreating the image in broader terms when each scene is invariably echoed down the road with new details.

If Man on Fire showed Tony Scott broadening his artistic palette, Domino shows him upending his bag of tricks on the table. Besides the sickly yellow gauze that washes over the film, Scott shifts film speed, exposure and lighting on a dime, overlapping images, his long lenses blurring the edges of the frame and capturing the object of focus in almost uncomfortable detail. Domino shares more than a few tricks with Scott's previous adaptation of a narratively daring upstart's script, True Romance, albeit in a more frenzied tone. The reveries in which Domino pours out her thoughts in the narration over half-connected imagery recall the lilting "Gassenhauer" sections of True Romance, and the final shootout is a bigger and bolder take on Tarantino's humorous climax. Even as Scott heads into new territory, he finds ways to tie himself back to his earlier work.

That referential streak extends beyond Scott's own corpus into a host of pop culture items that are paraded about the film on stakes. Domino's father, Laurence Harvey, was an actor, and we see him when The Manchurian Candidate comes on TV -- "I knew Frank Sinatra," chimes in Ed, to which more than one person at different parts responds, "Who didn't?" (Ed also claims to have jammed with Stevie Ray Vaughan and hooked up with Pat Benetar.) The Jerry Springer Show gets lampooned directly with Springer himself joining the fray, while the aforementioned executive (Christopher Walken, who communicates solely in his various tics as if someone made a supercut of his weirdest and funniest moments) signs up the bounty hunting team for a Dog the Bounty Hunter knockoff that glamorizes them in a manner that both disgusts and allures the Hollywood-detesting Domino. Tagging along for that show are former Beverly Hills 90210 stars Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green, whom Scott torments with constant references to their age and faded profiles, to say nothing of the physical punishment he metes out to them. The film even references Alf via the Afghani driver/demolitions expert. "He once ate a cat," Domino randomly supplies in a voiceover before clarifying: "We don't know how to pronounce his fucking name so we call him the cat-eating alien."

Had Kelly himself directed the film, he might have attempted to make some form of satire out of these references, but Scott uses them to contextualize his aesthetic and the offbeat, absurdist humor of the piece: the attention-deficit visuals grow out of the odd assortment of cultural touchstones assembled here and arranged by a man who trained as a painter. It's the perfect marriage of class and tastelessness.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of the film, however, is the manner in which Scott, whether intentionally or not, heads off any attempt on Kelly's part to try for any depth. Donnie Darko was riddled with symbols and metaphors that opened up interpretations beyond the bog-standard nature of the actual narrative, but Scott seems to take particular delight in throwing every potentially meaningful image at the wall until all that's left is a splattered collage. Domino constantly returns to the metaphor of a flipped coin to discuss her chances of survival during a job, and Scott shows a coin flipping in the air endlessly, often in front of a backdrop of an icon of Jesus, which in turn sometimes flashes back and forth between Jesus' and Choco's face. Domino's goldfish also enters into the fray, and given how many shots are repeated to the point of becoming motifs, even a seemingly meaningless image becomes a deliberately empty "symbol" through suggestion. The scene involving Tom Waits (ever the show-stealer) as some mystical wanderer in the desert proves this best of all: he speaks in portents but is divorced from the narrative even as he envisions the finale. The message is that there is no message. By stripping Kelly's more esoteric and muddied aspects and making them at once even more vague yet streamlined, he makes the strongest and most cohesive work Kelly's ever written, keeping all the fun and engaging doublebacks and misdirections while leaving out the thin satire (here, it's just dark comedy, and it works magnificently).

Despite the ridiculous pace the film maintains, Domino sags under the strain of its moving parts, most of them barreling ahead in opposition to the rest. But I still can't help but love the movie. Scott's visual style is so playful, overshooting someone and drifting back to proper framing as if someone accidentally put the outtake reels of setting up the blocking into the canisters for copying and distribution. He does not attempt to make the film about anything, instead using his knack for detail to paint an emotional abstract of what would otherwise be a painfully uninteresting film. I can not get the memory of the college kid's foot shaking in antsy impatience, the actual lion roar that comes out of Choco's grimacing mouth while on mescaline or the illuminated glimpses of Knightley's furious face in the climax as she fires assault rifles in darkness. Domino allowed Scott the chance to take stock of all that he'd learned with both the camera and the editing suite. He would refine the best of his abilities for use in his next project, and he'd end up making his masterpiece.

Man on Fire

Man on Fire was not Tony Scott's first triumph, having streamlined Quentin Tarantino's script for True Romance into something that actually benefited from outside tampering and scored two solid genre movies with Enemy of the State and Spy Game. But it was his 2004 film that set off Scott's modern reinvention as perhaps the most daring, or at least egregious, talent in American action film. Using a glossy/grainy digital aesthetic, endless in-camera effects in opposition to CGI and and remarkably sensual approach to blockbuster filmmaking, Scott would take the slapdash construction favored by such sloppy directors as Michael Bay and forcibly bend it toward something approaching poetry.

Scott's visual élan explodes from the start, as alternately slow and fast motion film, heavy grain, overexposure and even a fade to black and white gussy up the first images of the film. A scroll of informative text rolls across the screen saying that a kidnapping occurs in Mexico once every 60 seconds. When the text disappears and the frame unfreezes, Scott leaps into pure frenzy, layering overexposed images as cars speed up and shove people into backseats as onlookers scream helplessly. In this moment, the director reveals his biggest stylistic leap, that of deeply subjective filmmaking, rooted in the perspective of agitated people under extreme stress.

American cinema has occasionally posited the idea of a bodyguard hired to watch over children, but usually in a comedic way, playing on the idea that burly-'n'-surly trained mercenary juxtaposed with precocious tykes equals yuks aplenty. Yet as Man on Fire notes, kidnapping has grown to such an epidemic in Mexico that the bourgeoisie there have taken to hiring bodyguards out of necessity. A retired CIA operative, Rayburn (Christopher Walken), invites his old friend John Creasy (Denzel Washington, in the first of his collaborations with the director) to his comfortable estate in Mexico City to offer him such work. Aware that Creasy, a former Recon Marine, has lapsed into alcoholism and despair, Rayburn thinks that a steady job looking after a panicky middle-class family would be a way for Creasy to get his demons under control. Rayburn's even got a job lined up for Creasy to watch the daughter of a businessman (Marc Anthony) who does not particularly fear any kidnapping but wishes to placate his American wife's fears as cheaply as possible.

Scott's muscular but tender approach finds its perfect outlet in Washington, who has been steadily bulking up his entire career as if combating the onset of a paunch years in advance. But he's yet to lose that twinkle in his eye and the disarming power of his smile, and he can still collapse and entire film around him with one good look. Before he mentions his substance issues or chugs a drink, Creasy lets us know of his problems solely through Washington's body language, still mostly erect through rigorous military training but sagging through revulsion, not sloth. Those eyes never seem to look anywhere but inward, and the glimmering chrysalis that encases them suggests Creasy doesn't like what he sees. He takes the job because he has no other options, and his isolated depression makes him a mobile obelisk following around the chirpy, mature-beyond-her-years daughter of Samuel and Lisa, Lupita, or "Pita" for short (Dakota Fanning).

Bravely, Scott devotes nearly a whole hour to Creasy's ingratiation into the Ramos household. This arc follows the expected path -- hardened ex-soldier slowly warms to young girl's charms -- but cliché is only ever unbearable when nothing about it is new, and Scott's inventive framing combines with believable performances from Washington and Fanning to make for a friendly chemistry that practically never exists between child and adult.

Pita, at this point used to having a bodyguard, has the forthrightness of a child mixed with the no-nonsense talk one has with an employee, making her almost unbearably blunt. "Being black, is that a positive or negative in Mexico?" she asks Creasy as he drives her to school. "Time will tell," replies Creasy in that sardonically chipper tone that says he's already fed up with the conversation. Yet the sudden reintroduction of the in-camera effects after the (relative) calm when street people swarm the car in rush hour show that as much as Creasy may not care about her, he still won't let her get hurt, and he's still got his sharp instincts.

Only when a night of heavy drinking leads to a failed suicide attempt does Creasy finally merge those retained instincts with an actual interest in Pita's safety. Scott is brilliant with the suicide sequence, the frame warping and skipping as Creasy stumbles around in despair not unlike Willard at the start of Apocalypse Now. The cuts bewilder in a meaningful way, disorienting as the character is disoriented, occasionally stopping on such minor, beautiful images as whiskey dripping from John's sagging lip. The bullet he places in his gun misfires, and suddenly the frame calms as the experience centers Creasy. Scott isn't just playing around, he's getting at something here, a feeling rather than merely a presentation.

Creasy's epiphany leads him to start living life again, and he warms up to Pita in the usual way, helping her with history homework and awkwardly tiptoeing around the subject of concubines. Scott even devotes considerable time to the unnecessary sideplot of Pita's swim training just to allow her connection with Creasy to deepen. A full 45 minutes into the film, the biggest development in Man on Fire is the swim meet that allows Pita to put all the advice and practice Creasy helped her with into practice. Scott probably could have gotten away with making a film without any explosions or gunfights, so skilled is his ability to make this more human drama so kinetic.

Then, it all changes. Coming out of her piano lesson, Pita is cornered by kidnappers (and colluding cops), and not even Creasy's valiant efforts can prevent her seizure. Severely wounded, Creasy lies in a hospital bed as the police accuse him of murdering two officers and the Ramos family scrambles to retrieve their daughter, using an insurance policy Samuel took out to collect $10 million for a drop-off. But the drop goes awry and the kidnapper's nephew dies, leading the man to tell the family that he will not return Pita. When news of the girl's presumed death reaches Creasy's room, he wrenches himself from his bed and vows to kill anyone who had even the slightest involvement in Pita's kidnapping.

Unfortunately, Man of Fire soon lapses into too typical a revenge fantasy, presenting Creasy as a one-man army tearing his way through Mexico killing all in his path. Even the numerous twists of the narrative do not complicate the film so much as provide clever asides in Creasy's single-minded killing spree. He tortures information out of lackeys as he rises the ladder of a criminal organization, uncovering police corruption and even a more unexpected collaborator.

Scott's modern work is based fundamentally on feelings and moods, not the grandeur of typical blockbuster bombast, yet Man on Fire shows the director trying to fully break from the latter. Thus, the film occasionally shifts between his more intimate style and a larger focus, and the break from visceral immediacy hurts the film. Scott could also have done with some trimming, not, surprisingly, in the 50 minutes of build-up but the repetitive tedium of Creasy's rampage. Where the beginning displayed Scott's élan in such extraneous but delightful moments as the speeding up of the image as Creasy drives through a tunnel or the close-up of the daffodil Pita picked for Creasy situated next to his necklace of St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes (another gift from Pita), the rest of the film spends too much time playing Creasy's sickening bloodlust with a straight face. While the idea of Pita unlocking not only Creasy's humanity but his monstrous past brings up interesting if narrow possibilities, but Scott does not follow up on the potential theme.

Still, not all of Scott's violence here is as simple as it seems, and the more thoughtful approach he'd take to it later peeks through here and there. Pita's kidnapping is one of Scott's greatest sequences, communicating not Creasy's badass cool but his desperate concern for Pita's safety. He may have a steady aim and be seemingly impervious, but that's because his focus is entirely on the girl. The scene climaxes in a beautifully framed moment as a wounded Creasy and corrupt cop shoot each other, the sound cutting out so only Pita's terrified gasp is heard. Too often, though, I found myself pining for Scott's exciting framing of Pita's swim competition instead of the carnage of his his third-act mayhem.

Ultimately, Man on Fire is more coherent than Scott's subsequent Domino and Déjà Vu but lacks the avant-garde invention of those films. It also lacks the more focused narrative-driven tautness of Unstoppable. But the film still shows the major evolution of a director whom no one would suspect of being at the forefront of mainstream innovation. So many little touches, such as Scott's gleeful breaking of the 180^o rule to the incorporation of subtitles into the frame, placing them in the middle and animating them to coincide with the mood -- Lisa's tearful Spanish spoken to the kidnapper is translated in wavy subtitles, while the oft-repeated phrase "I'm just a professional" appears on-screen despite the words always being spoken in English, a motif of self-absolution from those in Creasy's sights. Though it may lack the power of subsequent efforts, Man on Fire still has enough ingenuity to stand out among revenge fantasies, and as much as I continue to feel let down by the brutality, I also continue to find myself moved by the ending, which coalesces the violence back into the sensual feel of the film's first half. There, he gets it all together; later films would show him applying the combined skills in full.