At his best, Tony Scott was the master of flash-bang movie-making

 
Nick Curtis @nickcurtis21 August 2012

Tony Scott was the British boy from the North-East who made it big in Hollywood, if never quite as big as his older, more brilliant brother Ridley.

Not a darling of the critics, he was nevertheless a consistent craftsman with a vivid and easily identifiable style, and his commercially driven, hi-octane tales defined for many adolescents in the Eighties what movies were all about. Also an adventurous producer in film and TV, Scott worked best as a director with material that was frankly ridiculous.

His critically panned first feature film, The Hunger, is a gothic-erotic vampire thriller starring David Bowie.

His first big commercial success, Top Gun, confects flash-bang boys’ toys, mawkish sentiment and overblown homoeroticism.

True Romance, from a script by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary, is a fairytale of nerd wish-fulfilment dressed up in pulpy drag.

All three transcended their essential absurdity to become classics, cult or otherwise. All were hugely influential: would we have Twilight or True Blood without The Hunger? This mismatched troika of hits has a brio and panache largely absent from the rest of his cinematic work.

The accepted line is that Scott favoured style over substance, crafting cinematic juggernauts that reliably made money and never aspired to art — unlike Ridley, who did both. Until today’s jolting news, this reputation never seemed particularly to bother him. His name, unlike Ridley’s, became a byword for a certain kind of cinema.

If you went to a Tony Scott movie, you supposedly knew what you were going to get: choppy editing, hectic action, gleaming bodywork (human and mechanical) and a brashness bordering on vulgarity, the legacy of the Scott brothers’ roots in advertising. This holds true for the likes of Beverly Hills Cop II or the brainless Tom Cruise vehicle Days of Thunder, but a lot of Scott’s work was efficient but unthrilling, promising more cheap thrills than it delivered.

Domino, starring Keira Knightley as a cigarette-choffing, lap-dancing bounty hunter, should have been a tawdry guilty pleasure, but wasn’t. Ditto The Fan, in which Robert De Niro stalked Wesley Snipes. Enemy of the State and Spy Game are precision-tooled conspiracy thrillers. His several films with Denzel Washington — including Man on Fire and his last completed film, Unstoppable — are solid bits of storytelling.

His films always delivered, though, and Tony, like Ridley, survived at the top of his game in Hollywood after other British directing talents of the era faded away. At his best he was hectically, madly brilliant: it’s a shame we won’t see what he’d have made of a planned Top Gun sequel.

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