Man on Fire (2004)
Tony Scott's 2004 Mexico City revenge thriller. One of the great late-career Denzel performances.
Writer: Brian Helgeland
Brian Helgeland won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for L.A. Confidential and collected a Razzie for The Postman in the same year, which he has described as the best week of his life.
L.A. Confidential is the achievement. James Ellroy’s novel is enormous and structurally unfilmable, and the adaptation cuts entire subplots while preserving the moral architecture.
He also wrote Mystic River and A Knight’s Tale, which he directed, and has moved between prestige adaptation and cheerful anachronism without much concern for consistency.
