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Man on Fire ★★
Does being deemed “adequate” make a show a success nowadays? Sometimes it seems like that’s all a streaming series aspires to. Setting a low bar, whether through expediency or lack of self-belief, is a worrying trend, and that’s definitely the case with this action-thriller. Liberally rebooting a property that was previously a 2004 Denzel Washington movie, these seven episodes about a broken soldier rediscovering his spirit and killing instincts too often do barely enough. Man on Fire ticks plenty of boxes, but they’re not great ones.
Played with stern commitment by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Watchmen), John Creasy is a former elite American soldier and CIA operative who has spent four years in a self-destructive spiral after his team were executed on a mission. He can barely hold it together when an old friend and colleague, Paul Rayburn (Bobby Cannavale), brings him to Brazil as a consultant to a government fearful of terrorist attacks during an election. Creasy soon has a primal motivation and someone to protect, Rayburn’s teenage daughter Poe (Billie Boullet).
Man on Fire is not a good film. It was the second Hollywood adaptation of AJ Quinnell’s 1980s pulp bestseller, exhibiting both garish and xenophobic instincts. But it had an exceptional performance (nine-year-old Dakota Fanning as a kidnap victim), and an accomplished performance (Washington’s vengeful bodyguard). Denzel’s Creasy had a cold, purposeful wrath, a self-immolating samurai, but those edges are shaved off for Abdul-Mateen II. There are individual scenes that speak to trauma and emotional reckoning, but they don’t linger on the storytelling. They’re punctuation.
We’re in the territory of The Night Agent, an existing Netflix success in this genre. With Mexico City standing in for Brazil, creator Kyle Killen (Halo) mixes political machinations, investigatory twists, and covert plans. Creasy accumulates offsiders, and there’s more Fast Five – also set in Brazil – than Reacher to this narrative. Alice Braga thankfully helps ground the show as Valeria Melo, a driver who helps Creasy and brings the country’s hillside favelas (informal, self-regulated enclaves) into blunt focus.
But if Man on Fire hedges the spiritual reckoning and sprinkles familiar influences, there’s no excuse for fumbling what should be its unshakeable foundation. The action set-pieces lack a distinctive vitality and their execution are short on inspiration – an episode that finds Creasy and his crew infiltrating a Brazilian jail to reach a target defies plausibility. It has an A-Team slickness. The breaking point? Creasy doing the cold stroll toward the camera as he sets off a fiery explosion in his wake. You can’t succeed by making do with cliches.
Man is Fire is now streaming on Netflix.
