Man on Fire

I only saw the last ten minutes, so maybe I needed a context to get it. But from where I was standing, it looked like another story about black man's life being thrown away for a little white girl. Is it just me, or is there something disturbingly antebellum/colonialist about that?

Okay, so there are many touching stories about a person sacrificing his or her life for a loved one. But what made this one seem NOT among this group was that it was not a familial tie or a romantic tie; nor did the sacrificer appear to have much agency in his death. On the contrary, the girl's mother was standing right there, waving goodbye to the black man as she sent him to the murderers, and running off with her daughter in a relieved embrace - without even a backward glance.

I was suspicious about this movie from the beginning because it involved an adult black man in the service of a small white child - how many PC directions could there possibly be? What I saw did not dislodge my suspicions. What was Denzel Washington thinking? I thought he was supposed to be a model and trailblazer for black and minority communities.