Film director Tony Scott, who died on 19 August 2012, loved pace and momentum and movement. His 16 feature films are not quiet or sober, slow or mediative – they’re in-your-face and unashamedly hyperactive and veer away from anything that might be boring. These movies celebrate cinema as pure, uncomplicated entertainment, rather than having a political or subtextual purpose. Scott was also a believer in ‘freshness’ rather than originality. He once said that originality is a myth – everything’s already been done – so instead he emphasised carefree pleasures such as action and comedy and energy and movie stars.
Born and raised in the north-east of England, his first toe was dipped into the filmmaking waters in 1962, when he was 18. His older brother, Ridley, was making a semi-autobiographical short called Boy and Bicycle, and hired Tony as both the lead actor and a general behind-the-scenes gofer. ‘It was two brothers together all day for six weeks, and you could see it sinking in,’ Ridley said later. ‘It was an education for Tony. Suddenly, he had a direction in life.’ A few years later, Tony followed his brother into the world of commercials: both men directed thousands of TV ads, built up good reputations and made a lot of money.
Ridley then shifted into making movies such as Alien and Blade Runner. Tony soon bagged a Hollywood career too, which kicked off in the 1980s. He found his groove directing gleeful, showy films that were often huge box-office hits… even if they disappointed sniffy critics. His canon is typified by crafted visuals – Scott loved his backlighting, long lenses, smoky interiors and sunsets – which create a massive impact on a cinema screen. But there is always heart underneath the razzmatazz. As much as he focussed on ‘surface’, Scott prided himself on his research into any given story or situation. He often found real-life equivalents of his major characters – ‘role models’, he called them – so he and his actors could ask them about small details and add layers of verisimilitude.
Scott took detours into the horror and sci-fi genres, but the backbone of his career was thrillers. And he returned to some subject matters more than once: the US navy (Top Gun, Revenge, Crimson Tide), sports (Days of Thunder, The Last Boy Scout, The Fan), the CIA (Enemy of the State, Spy Game), trains (The Taking of Pelham 123, Unstoppable), surveillance technology (Enemy of the State, Déjà Vu)…
The director also hired several stars multiple times – most notably his muse Denzel Washington, but also Val Kilmer, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Gene Hackman, Christopher Walken and others. As that list demonstrates, his films were undoubtedly male-dominated, with only two (The Hunger and Domino) having women as lead characters. But in the plus column the director worked with POC actors with a frequency that shamed many of his peers: he gave starring roles to Washington, Eddie Murphy, Will Smith, Halle Berry, Damon Wayans, Paula Patton, Wesley Snipes, Rosario Dawson…
To celebrate the incredible CV of Tony Scott – a populist, a showman, someone who’s long been one of my favourite filmmakers – I set myself the challenge of rewatching his 16 feature films, and coming up with a personal ranking…
16. Days of Thunder (1990)
Tony Scott made four films for the Hollywood producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson between 1986 and 1995; he did as much as anyone to define their signature mode of flashy popcorn movie. But this third effort, a motor-racing story starring Tom Cruise, was a troubled endeavour from lights out to chequered flag. Director and producers argued incessantly on set, causing huge delays to filming; writer Robert Towne was forced into hasty script changes; and the editing process was rushed to meet a release date. All this messiness is very evident in the finished film, which is the only truly bad movie of Tony Scott’s career. Cruise stars as an up-and-coming driver who blags a seat on the top-level NASCAR circuit. Robert Duvall is his grouchy team boss, while Nicole Kidman, Cruise’s then-girlfriend, plays a cursory love interest. Some of the races are shot excitingly enough, and the grease-and-garage world of the sport is captured well, but the soap-opera storyline never grabs your attention.
15. Revenge (1990)
For its first hour, this is a low-energy, bland drama about retired pilot Jay Cochran who moves to Mexico to hang out with his wealthy friend Tibey Mendez. Jay falls in love with Mendez’s young wife, Miryea, and they begin an affair – but this is an unwise move, given that Mendez is a powerful crime kingpin. Then, halfway through, there’s a scene of brutal violence. This takes the story into unsettlingly dark areas, and the film becomes terser and tougher, more like a cheap exploitation flick… Anthony Quinn is appropriately menacing as Mendez, while Madeleine Stowe, who coincidentally later starred in an unrelated TV show called Revenge, is decent too as Miryea. But Kevin Costner – who stars as Jay, was one of the producers and even considered directing the movie himself – is miscast. With his carefree, Hollywood swagger, we never quite understand why this Top Gun-style fighter pilot hooks up with a man who’s clearly a dangerous criminal. Tony Scott would retell a similar story 14 years later with Man on Fire, which coincidentally is also set in Mexico, and sell the emotional undercurrents much more strongly than here.
14. Domino (2005)
In 2004, Scott was hired to make a short film for Amazon.com. Agent Orange was about two lost souls connecting at a train station, and it gave the director the freedom to experiment with form. So he shot his footage with hand-cranked cameras, which produced jerky, unpredictable images of varied frame rates, and he added double exposures to create a trippy, dreamy effect. These techniques… and *so much more*… then fed into 2005 feature Domino, a based-on-real-life tale of an Englishwoman working as a bounty hunter in modern-day LA. The whole film is a panic attack of cinematic excess; a pill-popping fever dream of manipulated footage, hyperactive editing, jump cuts, crazy camerawork, montages, a sickly green colour palette, on-screen captions, needle-drops, flashbacks, cross-cutting, brutal violence and even a Jerry Springer cameo. Keira Knightley plays Domino Harvey with tomboy coolness as she escapes her boring rich-girl life to chase after criminals for a living, while Lucy Liu, Christopher Walken, Delroy Lindo, Mena Suvari and Mickey Rourke have supporting roles. In truth, the aggressive directing style swamps a needlessly complicated storyline, the characters are little more than mannequins being moved around the shop window, and on a first viewing the film will simply be too irritating for most people. But you’ve got to admire the balls in using Hollywood money to make something so fucking *weird*.
13. Beverly Hills Cop II (1987)
The original Beverly Hills Cop, directed by Martin Brest and released in 1984, was such a monster hit that a sequel was inevitable – so producers Simpson and Bruckheimer turned to Tony Scott, who’d just made them a fortune with Top Gun. Like the first film, this follow-up is ostensibly a crime thriller. A storyline about a gang pulling off elaborate heists is played out with R-rated violence and colourful language in a familiar format. However, all this is window dressing. Really the film is a delivery system for the comic energy of star Eddie Murphy, who reprises his role as Detroit detective Axel Foley. It’s easy to forget now, after 30 years of kids films and flops, but Murphy was a huge box-office draw in the 1980s, hitting big with 48 Hrs, Trading Places and Coming to America. And he is this movie’s star attraction. The crime story never convinces, the emotion is hackneyed and the new characters are all very dull. (Brigitte Nielsen’s Karla Fry, a statuesque baddie who shoots a police chief and wears a succession of sci-fi sunglasses, is at least memorable. But it’s a dreadful performance.) The fun instead comes from Murphy’s episodic improvs – Foley blagging his way into a country club by pretending to carry nuclear weapons; Foley tricking some builders into letting him live in a mansion; Foley taking his cop friends from the first film, Judge Reinhold’s Detective Billy Rosewood and John Ashton’s Sergeant John Taggart, to a nightclub and telling everyone that the latter is really President Gerald Ford. All in all, it’s nonsense. But an amiable, inoffensive 90 minutes of nonsense.
12. The Fan (1996)
Gil Renard (Robert De Niro) is a down-on-his-luck salesman whose biggest passion in life is baseball – specifically the San Francisco Giants, who have just signed a new star player called Bobby Rayburn. But when Rayburn’s season fails to ignite, Gil believes he can step in to help the batter… A splashy, flashy, energetic film, The Fan more or less passed people by in 1996. The box office was poor, as were reviews. But viewed now, a quarter of a century later, it works well as both a whip-fast thriller and a commentary on insidious male obsession. At first Gil seems like an everyman who takes baseball a bit too seriously, the way many men treat sport, but increasingly we come to realise that he’s a man-child living in a delusion. As he focuses his stalker-like gaze on Rayburn (an impressive Wesley Snipes), who is simultaneously going through his own personal issues, Gil neglects his son and his job and takes drastic actions… A character teetering on the edge of intense behaviour is, of course, prime Robert De Niro territory and we sense something of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle and Cape Fear’s Max Cady in this character. The script – based on a 1995 novel and written by former Cheers staffer Phoef Sutton – does a good job of balancing the dark subject matter with moments of dry humour, but Tony Scott’s pyrotechnical camerawork maybe gets in the way of any genuine understanding of Gil’s psychology. The final sequence also tips over into outlandish.
11. The Hunger (1983)
Scott’s first feature film was this art-house horror with few characters and little action – very atypical when compared to the rest of his filmography. In 1980s New York, a 3,000-year-old vampire played by Catherine Deneuve (‘untouchable and surreal’ said Scott of her performance; Charlotte Rampling turned the role down) fears being lonely after her long-time consort (David Bowie) begins to rapidly age, so she ensnares a new lover (Susan Sarandon, who later joked that the lesbian subplot changed her fanbase somewhat). The Hunger is certainly a beautiful piece of work, often looking like a high-end rock video. There’s an ethereal quality, stately music, dark sexuality, monochromatic visuals, lots of billowing curtains and even an appearance by Goth band Bauhaus, but the story lacks an emotional punch. Scott was influenced by Stanley Kubrick, especially his candle-lit period film Barry Lyndon, and The Hunger has some of that same icy detachment. There are also echoes of Blade Runner, recently made by Tony’s brother Ridley, especially in the use of film-noir Venetian blinds, Art Deco locations and smoky rooms. Slow, languid and overtly stylish, The Hunger’s hypnotic, esoteric power builds with repeated viewings.
10. Spy Game (2001)
We’re in 1991. Rogue CIA operative Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt) is captured while attempting to lift a prisoner from a Chinese jail. Back in Washington, his former mentor, Nathan Muir (Robert Redford), is about to retire when he’s called into a meeting. Should the CIA help their man, who will be executed the following day? Or should they appease the Chinese and let him die? As the bigwigs discuss the dilemma, Muir explains how he met, recruited and trained Bishop, so there are lengthy flashbacks set in war-torn Vietnam, Cold War Berlin and bomb-shelled Beirut – each one shot with a different colour palette. All this results in a bizarre concept for an action thriller: a race-against-time story where most of the characters spend *hours* sitting around talking. But for those paying attention, the script seeds plenty of information that will be important during the third-act rescue plan – sometimes smartly, sometimes not – and the movie zips along with real drive. Tony Scott took over this project after another director was deemed too inexperienced, so his lead actors were on board before he was – and initially Robert Redford was unsure of Scott’s kinetic shooting style. Redford is typically watchable, though, while the cat-and-mouse intrigue keeps the attention and the ending socks home emotionally.
9. Top Gun (1986)
In the four years since the financial failure of The Hunger, Scott had gone back to making adverts – and more or less given up on the idea of being a features director. However, an ad campaign he shot with a Saab car racing a jet fighter caught the attentions of Bruckheimer and Simpson when they were prepping an aviation action film… Scott initially wanted to make a darker, murkier movie. He described his first pitch to the producers as ‘Apocalypse Now on an aircraft carrier’. But when pushed towards a more commercial tone he decided to treat the script’s hotshot Navy pilots as if they were rock’n’roll stars. The resulting film is a none-more-80s roller-coaster ride – dazzling charisma from lead actor Tom Cruise, era-defining music, outrageous flying stunts, sun-kissed cinematography, alpha-male posturing, a volleyball scene filmed like it’s from a soft-porn flick, big hair, sunglasses, bomber jackets, motorbikes, sweaty faces and endearingly corny dialogue. It ain’t subtle, and viewers wanting decent female characters will be very disappointed, but it’s huge escapist fun. Scott later spent many years trying to get a sequel off the runway, but the project hadn’t become airborne by the time he died. When the superb Top Gun: Maverick came along a whopping 36 years after its predecessor, Scott was acknowledged with a dedication title card.
8. The Last Boy Scout
There were notorious arguments on set during the production of this attitude-driven neo-noir – director Tony Scott, producer Joel Silver and the two lead actors all squared off in macho power games. Unlike the troubles behind the scenes of Days of Thunder, however, this acrimony was well hidden. The resulting film sings with panache and feels like it was made by a team in complete simpatico. Updating a Maltese Falcon-style story for the brash 1990s, The Last Boy Scout stars Bruce Willis, who is perfect casting as a grizzled gumshoe. The actor takes his wisecracking persona from Moonlighting and Die Hard but significantly turns down the joy – PI Joe Hallenbeck is a dishevelled man with a languid cigarette in his mouth, who sleeps in his car and has a marriage in the toilet, but is also perceptive and smart and tough. After rumbling his wife having an affair, he’s given a case that seems straightforward. A waitress/dancer (Halle Berry) needs protection after being threatened. But when she’s killed on his watch, Hallenbeck starts to uncover a conspiracy in the world of professional sports. American football’s top league – due to rights issues the term NFL is never used – is on the decline, with falling attendances and poor TV ratings, and a betting syndicate is blackmailing players to fix matches. Aiding Hallenbeck in his investigation is Corey’s boyfriend, Jimmy Dix (Damon Wayans), who was a star quarterback but has been suspended on gambling charges. The pair make for a classic odd-couple double act – they hate each other (as the actors did, it seems) but work well as a team and eventually form a friendship. Like all classic noirs, this plot is both seedy and intricate, and keeps opening up new avenues of interest. But there’s also the kind of wildness that the best films written by Shane Black always have: caustic humour, plot twists, reversals of fortune, lots of exploding cars, and subversive shocks such as a sports star who murders an opponent during a televised game. (Black would go full throttle with spoofing genre conventions two years later with Last Action Hero.) The project was a perfect fit for Tony Scott, who was able to let loose with his visual flamboyance while always retaining an awareness of the film’s inherent silliness.
7. Crimson Tide (1995)
Another film based on the US Navy and produced by Simpson and Bruckheimer, Crimson Tide is a very different beast from the extrovert, immature Top Gun. Whereas that had been big and silly and flamboyant, this is a taut, machine-tooled thriller – slick, sharp and focused. When his first officer is taken sick, nuclear-submarine captain Frank Ramsey (Gene Hackman) hires a replacement in the form of the cool, calm Lieutenant Commander Ron Hunter (Denzel Washington in his first film for Tony Scott). With a despotic Russian leader threatening world peace (just imagine…), Ramsey’s ballistic missile submarine, the USS Alabama, is sent into the Pacific. However, confusion reigns when two messages are sent from fleet HQ – Ramsey thinks the orders say to launch a nuclear strike against Russia, but Hunter has his doubts and wants to double-check… The foundation of the whole film is this clash between captain and second-in-command. At first a relationship of guarded civility and rote-respect, the two men begin to disagree and butt heads even before the fever-pitch argument about the orders – and seeing heavyweight film actors Hackman and Washington slug it out verbally is an absolute joy. These masters know how to make every moment feel alive and important and full of telling details. Quentin Tarantino did some uncredited work on the dialogue and his contribution is usually assumed to be the addition of some pop-culture references (previous submarine movies, comic books), but perhaps he helped punch up the central relationship too. And the stage for the theatrics is excellently set by Tony Scott and his team: the Alabama is all claustrophobic corridors, smoky stairwells and sweaty faces lit with coloured spotlights like they’re in a Dario Argento horror film. Those faces are played by actors who know how to make secondary characters vivid and memorable – Viggo Mortensen, James Gandolfini, Rocky Carroll, George Dzundza and others – while the anamorphic cinematography is terrific, enhancing drama and danger all the time. Fantastic entertainment. (A side note: as some of the images in this blog post suggest, Tony Scott had a fondness for baseball caps. He took to wearing them himself once baldness struck in early middle age, and a notable number of his actors use them too: see Hackman and Washington in Crimson Tide, Robert Duvall in Days of Thunder, Brad Pitt in Spy Game, Kelly McGillis in Top Gun, multiple characters in baseball drama The Fan…)
6. Déjà Vu (2006)
Tony Scott’s only science-fiction flick is set in a post-9/11, post-Katrina New Orleans, and sees Denzel Washington play ATF agent Doug Carlin. Soon after a bomb rips through a ferry, killing hundreds, Doug is introduced to a radical new technology by Val Kilmer’s FBI boss. This machine allows them to look into the past – but only on a strict four-day time delay – and watch anyone in the city. Can Doug solve the crime before it happens, and possibly even save a key victim called Claire (Paula Patton)? We’re in the kind of surveillance genre Scott had used in Enemy of the State (see below), but the process now also becomes a twisted satire of filmmaking as Doug orders up different angles and close-ups and assembles his bad guy’s narrative. This is a wildly inventive time-travel idea and opens up plenty of fascinating questions for both us and Doug. Repeated viewings of the film reveal subtle details which suggest a circular storyline has been playing out countless times, with cause and effect churned up in a blender, but we still invest in *our* version of Doug and his chances of stopping the explosion. ‘You can be wrong a million times, you only have to be right once,’ he says. This intricately plotted movie was written by Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio, who had issues with some of the changes Scott made. One amendment was a new car-chase sequence with Doug driving in the present… and the bad guy driving in the past. (Doug has goggles that allows him to see, in real time, what was on the road 100 hours previously.) Scott argued, a bit dubiously, that he was moving the film’s concepts from science fiction to science fact – but either way the scene is a brilliantly bonkers piece of cinema. Elsewhere, alongside all the Star Trek tech, the film has a downbeat mood. Doug isn’t a dour man – that devilish Denzel charisma is often dialled up – but he’s still a film-noir loner detective, and he also takes part in one of the oddest romances in cinema. Doug first meets victim Claire after the explosion – when she’s dead on the coroner’s slab. He holds her hand, looks into her blank eyes and comments on how she was beautiful. He then becomes fascinated with her as he spies on her in the past (even watching her shower at one point), hoping that she will lead him to the bomber. A director with a more ghoulish or macabre intent might have twisted this into a form of cinematic necrophilia, but Tony Scott goes for the noble and the sincere – and we therefore care about both characters. Enormous fun.
5. Man on Fire (2004)
Tony Scott had tried to get an adaptation of the novel Man on Fire made in the early 80s, but ultimately he wasn’t involved with a version released in 1987. So when time came for a remake, he attacked the material with blood-and-guts intensity. This is essentially the kind of vigilante plot that Charles Bronson would have once starred in. But what lifts 2004’s Man on Fire above such tawdry fare is a combination of Denzel Washington’s soulful presence and Tony Scott’s visual brilliance… John Creasy (Washington) is an alcoholic loner with a shady past in the US special forces – ‘Do you think God will forgive us for what we’ve done?’ he asks a friend in an early scene. He’s looking for work in Mexico, where kidnapping people for the ransom money is rife, and soon bags a job as a bodyguard for a rich couple’s young daughter – the wise-beyond-her-years Pita (Dakota Fanning, fantastic). At first Creasy finds it difficult to spend time with a child – he finds her irritating and tiresome. But slowly, of course, a strong bond forms between the two. Creasy becomes as much a father figure as a security expert, coaching Pita to swim and teaching her some espionage tricks. There’s a genuine, believable warmth between the characters – all the better for setting up the plot development that’s coming with dreaded predictability. When Pita is snatched off the street by a gang, Scott films the sequence with thrilling innovation. Hand-cranked cameras and ramped editing emphasise the danger and create an expressionistic mood; the world is off-kilter and chaotic, Creasy’s distress is savagely dramatised. After recovering from a gunshot wound, Creasy then goes after the gang and what follows are scenes of brutal retribution that anticipate Washington’s Equalizer films by a decade. But the groundwork done in the movie’s opening 50 minutes saves all this from being gratuitous torture porn; we understand Creasy’s obsession. Man on Fire was Washington’s first film for Tony Scott in nine years (Robert De Niro had turned the part down) and he brings a monumental weight to the role. Creasy is a stock character – the suicidal loner with personal demons – and he’s involved in a stock relationship: the cynical, damaged man softened by an idealistic child. But in the hands of Scott, Washington and writer Brian Helgeland (LA Confidential), Creasy is so much more. Whether he’s quoting the Bible with a sadness in his eyes or buying a Linda Ronstadt CD to cheer himself up, we often infer a painful backstory and feel for Creasy straightaway… All this missed the mark for some viewers, however. The film was not a critical success, with American reviewer AO Scott – another ‘Anthony Scott’, coincidentally – saying some especially egregious things about his namesake. Others took against the film’s vigilantist politics or its unflattering portrayal of Mexico City. But while often labelled as a movie about revenge, Man on Fire is actually a mythical story of redemption. It absolutely *soars*.
4. The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)
This film was originally going to be called simply Pelham 123, to distinguish it from the 1974 adaptation of John Godey’s novel. As in the 1970s movie, a group of terrorists seize a New York City subway train and hold the passengers ransom for a huge amount of money (Scott’s version ups the fee from $1 million to $10 million). Leading the bad guys this time is John Travolta, snarling his way Pacino-like through the role of Ryder – an aggressive man with a prison tat, a Fu Manchu moustache and a fondness for theatrical speechmaking. Meanwhile, the transit coordinator attempting to talk him down is Denzel Washington’s calm, personable Walter Garber, who just happens to be on duty when the incident takes place. Tony Scott had to work hard to convince Washington to take the role, eventually succeeding by pitching the character as ‘Mr Everyman’ – a contrast from the powerful military and law-enforcement men of their previous collaborations. Not that the movie is down-to-earth or mundane. Knowing that his action thriller is built around a phone call between two men who stay sat in their seats, Scott compensates by amping up the energy at every opportunity. We get hyper-quick cutting, more use of variable frame-rates, and – for scenes in the head offices of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority – an almost permanently moving camera, which arcs and spins dizzyingly around Garber’s desk. The result is an exciting popcorn movie with no fat on the bone. (These days, however, there is a sad subtext to The Taking of Pelham 123. The story’s climax is set on the Manhattan Bridge and features a character pleading for someone to end his life. Just three years after the film’s release, Tony Scott jumped to his death from a bridge in Los Angeles. At the time, rumours circulated that he was overwhelmed by a bad cancer diagnosis – perhaps a terminal one. The family soon denied this, as did the official coroner’s report, though Ridley Scott later talked of his brother dealing with a long-term cancer battle. Tony Scott was 68.)
3. Unstoppable (2010)
An example of pure cinema, this exhilarating disaster movie is built around a single, 90-minute action sequence. The plot begins when a moving freight train is allowed to leave a depot with no driver aboard – a potential disaster because it’s pulling explosive cargo. (The idea was gleamed from a real-life incident in 2001.) This one small mistake soon snowballs into a 100mph epic, as various plans are attempted to stop the ever-accelerating train before it careers through populated areas… Our leads are two bickering railroad workers who realise they are best placed to solve the crisis. Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington) is an old stager about to lose his job; Will Colson (Chris Pine) is a young buck whose heart isn’t in it; but they must work together to stop the runaway train. There’s just enough drama – Frank’s grief/loneliness, Will’s legal problems with his wife – to flesh out the muscles and make us care about these popcorn characters caught in the maelstrom of danger and action. Elsewhere, the cast is filled with actors able to make instant impressions, whether it be Lew Temple’s cowboy-ish railway worker or Rosario Dawson’s yardmaster Connie Hooper, both of whom deserve their own spin-offs. These people are deliberately unglamorous and blue-collar, because Tony Scott knew that all the ‘Hollywood’ is in the intensity and thrill of the high-speed chase. Making his final film before taking his own life in 2012, Scott shows a *masterful* control of visual storytelling. He knows exactly how to create, sustain and ratchet up tension – from a sedate start to a fever-pitch finale – while the physical movement of characters and vehicles always has the kind of clarity that’s often missing from CG-heavy blockbusters. This is a film of visceral physicality, with enormous stunts and crashes and near-misses done for real. Scenes in the train cabs, meanwhile, are sometimes shot in real moving trains, sometimes faked in a studio, but never feel anything less than vibrant and vital. Stripped down and unpretentious, Unstoppable is a cinematic masterpiece of dynamic movement, pulsating speed and widescreen panache. Both Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan have raved about this film. There are also echoes of Spielberg’s Duel in the way that huge, hulking, heavy vehicles are shot like they’re mythical creatures – massive dragons thundering through the Pennsylvania countryside.
2. True Romance (1993)
The complex genesis of True Romance started with a script written by Quentin Tarantino‘s pal Roger Avery in the mid 1980s. Tarantino redrafted the idea, cutting out a significant B-plot that later became the basis for the movie Natural Born Killers, and intended to direct the movie himself. However, he then met Tony Scott through a mutual friend at Scott’s birthday party. Tarantino was an avowed fan – he’d loved Revenge, for example, and later affectionately mocked Top Gun in a cameo acting role in 1994 film Sleep with Me – so gave his blessing to Scott taking over the True Romance project. The result is a scintillating marriage of the two men’s energies. Christian Slater stars as Clarence, an optimistic slacker who likes comic books, obscure movies and Elvis Presley. After hooker-with-a-heart Alabama (a terrific Patricia Arquette) falls for him, they accidentally end up with a suitcase full of cocaine and head to LA to sell it. However, while they negotiate with a maniacal movie producer, the mob who own the drugs are on their tail… In some ways, the movie is a series of set-pieces, such as the opening 17 minutes in which Clarence and Alabama meet, fall in love and get married; Clarence’s tough-guy impression when he visits (and kills) her despicable pimp; the deliciously OTT gunfight in a hotel suite that climaxes the film; and most famously a confrontation between Clarence’s father and a gangster, which is an extraordinary, 10-minute scene of brutality, one-upmanship and acidic dialogue played with grit and guts by Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken. But to focus on these individually is to miss the film’s overall sweep, which is constantly imbued with whimsy, sincerity and hope. This film is a wish-fulfilment writ large, packing in sex and drugs and violence and melancholic music and cool quips and the thirst for a better life. Clarence is essentially an urban superhero; Alabama is a wet dream come to life. But that’s the point: this film is a *fantasy*; everything is naively romantic rather than boringly realistic. The hugely impressive cast is stacked full of class and talent – Slater, Arquette, Hopper, Walken, Val Kilmer, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, Bronson Pinchot, Samuel L Jackson, Michael Rapaport, Saul Rubinek, Conchata Ferrell, James Gandolfini, Chris Penn, Tom Sizemore, Ed Lauter – and Tony Scott shows an astonishing command of his plot and his characters, directing everything with so much pace and panache. Unlike the acrimony when Oliver Stone made a butchered version of Natural Born Killers, Tarantino enjoyed what Scott did with his material, which is semi-autobiographical and his most personal script to date. The story was inspired by his time working at VHS rental shop Video Archives, a mythologised part of Quentin’s pre-fame narrative, with the lead character’s workplace shifted to a comic-book store. ‘I didn’t get a suitcase full of cocaine, and I didn’t know any gangsters,’ Tarantino has said. ‘But even though all that stuff was movie shit, the people at Video Archives felt like it was this big-budget, Tony Scott-directed version of their childhood memories. It captured our aesthetic. It captured our je ne sais quoi.’
1. Enemy of the State (1998)
Enemy of the State is a 1,000-horsepower muscle car. When the accelerator is pushed and the engine revs, the road is eaten up and corners are taken at speed… The story is the kind of ‘innocent man caught up in a conspiracy he doesn’t understand’ plot that Alfred Hitchcock once revelled in, but updated for the ostentatious, energetic 1990s. Will Smith, deploying his major-league star quality, plays labour lawyer Robert Dean, who unwittingly acquires the videotape of a murder. When the killer, a corrupt spymaster played by Jon Voight, comes after him, Robert’s life is upturned. His house is ransacked, his wife doubts his innocence, and he loses his job. With the help of a shadowy ally called Brill (Gene Hackman), Robert must find out why he’s been targeted… Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) and Tony Gilroy (The Bourne Identity) both worked on the script, which harkens back to 70s paranoia thrillers like The Conversation, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men with its tale of unchecked, state-sanctioned surveillance and the corrupting power of American politics. (In fact, Enemy of the State positions itself as a spiritual sequel to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation by using a photograph of Gene Hackman from that earlier movie.) The tightly packed plot sees a thematic use of videos and camera and technology – the murder of an anti-surveillance politician is accidentally caught on a trap camera; Robert’s day job involves a conflict with the Mob over a videotape; the bad guys can call on CCTV feeds and live satellite imagery to hunt down fugitives (including some fantasy “zoom and enhance” that puts Blade Runner to shame). This Big Brother-riffing motif is just as topical now as it was in 1998, and means the movie hasn’t dated in any significant way. As for the cast, Smith, Voight and Hackman are the highlights but the film is populated with talented, watchable actors in supporting roles: Regina King as Robert’s wife; Lisa Bonet as his fixer and former girlfriend; Ian Hart, Jake Busey, Barry Pepper and Scott Caan as covert agents; Jason Lee as the geek who accidentally films the murder; Gabriel Byrne in a showy, two-scene cameo; Jack Black and Seth Green as tech boffins; Stuart Wilson as a politician; Tom Sizemore as a mob boss; Philip Baker Hall as Robert’s boss; and Jason Roberts as the congressman who’s assassinated because he won’t allow some fascist legislation to pass… Tony Scott, meanwhile, marshals all aspects of his filmmaking craft – cinematography, editing, mise en scene, music, choice of locations – to create a fluid yet pulsating beat that powers the 120 minutes of runtime. Extensive use of long lenses keeps every scene feeling claustrophobic and intense, even if staged on a grand scale, while the main plot is embellished with comedy asides and flamboyant action. This film is fast but never feels rushed; funny but never silly; compelling and exciting and gripping. The textbook example of the techno-thriller genre.
Agree with this ranking? Disagree? Let me know in the comments section below…
Ian Farrington 