Sandy and I went to see this movie after work last night. We don’t go on “dates” very often during the week so this was a nice change of pace. We saw it at a second run two dollar theater and we both got our four dollars worth of entertainment. The movie is about 2-1/2 hours long so if you figure a cost of around eighty cents an hour this was a real good deal.

Pros: Creasy (Denzel Washington) is the stereotypical tough guy with deep seated emotional problems. Early on the movie he has a vague conversation with his friend Rayburn (Christopher Walken) where he asks, “Do you think God will forgive us for what we’ve done?” “No,” Rayburn replies. It isn’t until much later that we learn that that Creasy has been working as a mercenary since he finished his military career.

How can he torture the bad guys to get information from them before he kills them? Let me count the ways! Creasy is certainly creative in his methods of both torture and death. Once we got to this point the movie finally got interesting.

Cons: The movie gets off to a really slow start. Creasy’s way children reminds of my own. When the girl he is hired to guard tries to get him to open up about his past, he tells young Pita (Dakota FAnning), “I was hired to protect you, not to be your friend.” This doesn’t make her mother, Lisa (Radha Mitchell), very happy. “You don’t have kids,” she asks him at one point. I expected him to reply as I usually do when I’m asked this question, “Don’t have any, don’t want any, and I sure don’t want to baby-sit somebody else’s!” Then again, I guess he esentially took a baby-sitting job, didn’t he?

I guess that watching Creasy develop his relationship with Pita is an essential part of the movie but I quite bored during this part. Once he started going after her kidnappers, things picked up quite well however.

The director also seems to like a lot of artsy-fartsy camera work that I just found confusing an distracting. I would have given the movie an extra point or two if they had just left this junk out.

On my patented 1 to 10 scale, I give it an 8.