The revenge story is a story so simple, one would think that it would be pretty hard to screw up. Someone is wronged in some way; they deliver bloody vengeance. Charles Bronson did it seven or eight times. Just recently, Quentin Tarantino took that formula to a whole new level. So it amazes me when a director takes a decent screenplay with this kind of story and one of today’s best working actors and makes one of the worst films of the year.

Man on Fire follows the story of Creasy (Denzel Washington), a former covert-ops soldier who now has a drinking problem because he’s haunted by the terrible things he’s done in his soldiering. Now living in Mexico City, he’s hired by a wealthy Mexican family to protect their 10-year-old daughter Pita (Dakota Fanning) because Mexico City is over-run with kidnapping. Despite Creasy’s rampant alcoholism, the family decides that he’s good enough (and more importantly cheap enough) to protect their daughter.

The film spends its first hour trying to develop the relationship between Creasy and Pita and, for the most part, it succeeds. Despite Fanning’s tendency to come off more like a child actor than just a normal child, the two work well together and create a reasonable semblance of redemption for Creasy.

But redemption stories are not as exciting as kill-everyone-and-everything stories, and as already given away in the trailer, the kidnappers get Pita, Creasy gets shot and then he goes out for bloody revenge. And, as an audience, we let him. We would let Creasy nuke a small nation populated entirely by puppies because no one gets to hurt a 10-year-old, blue-eyed, blond-haired girl. No one. Not even puppies.

The film has some pretty imaginative kills and Denzel delivers the excellent performance one can always expect from him. In terms of story, music, acting and production design, the film is pretty solid. It’s not a classic by any means, but there’s nothing atrocious that needs to be covered up.

That said, director Tony Scott must have thought that the entire film was a disaster and that the only way to save it was to engage in the most obnoxious directing I have ever seen. Scott is not new to the directing game. He’s been doing it for about 20 years and has such films as Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II and Crimson Tide to his credit. He’s Ridley Scott’s (Alien, Black Hawk Down) brother, so the talent is in the gene pool. And yet Man on Fire looks like it was directed by a high school student who has just discovered film editing tools and speed.

Man on Fire absolutely refuses to calm down. It’s epilepsy incarnate, not allowing a single moment of letting the camera and the colors rest. If people aren’t talking for a few seconds, then Scott decides that viewers will lose interest unless he fills that brief time by shaking the camera and using every color filter known to humanity.

And as the film progresses, Scott decides that people might lose interest in the actual dialogue as well, and thus creates the most flagrant abuse of subtitles ever committed to celluloid. At first, he does this normally by translating the Spanish that some of the characters speak. Then he decides to start subtitling the English. Then he decides to make the subtitles move around, zooming in and out, taking on a weird life of their own. Then he decides that it’d be neat to start changing the font. If you can find another film where the director changes the font mid-film to try and give the words power, then this college should give you your B.A. in Cinema Studies right now.

Tony Scott has created a directorial disaster so bad that he should have his Directors’ Guild Association card revoked for five years and be banned from editing machines for life. He’s created a film that people with hyperactive disorder would watch and then say, “Dude, focus.” The only redeeming value is that it sometimes gets so bad it succeeds in unintentional hilarity. It’s a shame that everyone else seems to be doing his best, but it all gets overshadowed by one man’s insanity.