Movie · 2004 · Action, Drama, Thriller · 2h 26m · R · English
Curator score: 4.8/10 (644K ratings)
Creasy's art is death, and he is about to paint his masterpiece.
Overview
Jaded ex-CIA operative John Creasy reluctantly accepts a job as the bodyguard for a 10-year-old girl in Mexico City. They clash at first, but eventually bond, and when she's kidnapped he's consumed by fury and will stop at nothing to save her life.
Ratings
Curator score: 4.8/10
IMDb: 7.7/10
Letterboxd: 3.74/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 39%
Metacritic: 47
TMDB: 7.5/10
Director
Tony Scott
Production
Fox 2000 Pictures, Regency Enterprises, New Regency Pictures, Scott Free Productions, Epsilon Motion Pictures, Estudios Churubusco Azteca
Cast
Denzel Washington, Dakota Fanning, Christopher Walken, Radha Mitchell, Marc Anthony, Giancarlo Giannini, Rachel Ticotin, Mickey Rourke, Roberto Sosa, Jesús Ochoa, Gero Camilo, Mario Zaragoza, Charles Paraventi, Carmen Salinas, Esteban de La Trinidad, Angelina Peláez, Norma Pablo, Rosa María Hernández, Heriberto del Castillo, Steve Gonzales
Where to watch
AMC+, Philo
Curator Review
Verdict
A bruising, emotionally charged revenge thriller with a stylized visual assault and a deeply felt center. It’s messy, extreme, and often morally ugly, but the bond between Creasy and the child gives the violence real weight.
Best for
fans of intense revenge thrillers
viewers who like stylized early-2000s action
people drawn to damaged antiheroes
audiences who want a bleak but emotional rescue story
Skip if
you dislike graphic violence and torture
you prefer restrained, realistic filmmaking
you want a clean moral framework
you’re turned off by hyperactive editing and aggressive style
Overview
Tony Scott turns a familiar kidnapping-revenge setup into something feverish, abrasive, and strangely moving. The film’s visual overload, fractured rhythm, and blast-furnace intensity can feel excessive, but they also make the story feel like a man burning himself alive from the inside out.
Worth noting
Denzel Washington anchors the movie with a performance that starts as exhaustion and hardens into ritualized fury. The relationship with Dakota Fanning gives the film its heart, so the later violence lands less like wish fulfillment than a tragic escalation of devotion, guilt, and self-destruction.
Bottom line
It’s not a subtle movie, and it doesn’t really want to be. What it does want is to make vengeance feel spiritually corrosive, while still delivering the rush of a hard-charging action thriller. For viewers open to its extremes, it’s one of the most distinctive studio thrillers of its era.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Grooveman (5★) · 3486 likes
"Forgiveness is between them and God. It's my job to arrange the meeting."
Calum Marsh (4★) · 2477 likes
Mainstream movie critics spent 10 years giving Tony Scott shit because his movies looked like music videos, so now every blockbuster looks like a Netflix Original and every studio director has had their personal style driven out of them by Kevin Feige. This is art.
comrade_yui (5★) · 1477 likes
tony scott cranking up a remix of linda ronstadt and nine inch nails while denzel spirals into a drunken suicide attempt, gun shot echoes throughout time and space, cut to clair de lune, denzel cradles a misfired bullet in his hand, the lines of his palm criss-crossing past the curves of the miracle that he's somehow still alive. he sees the works of god in what he does; his life is not his own, but belongs to someone else.