The problem with turning successful movies into long-form TV series isn’t just that it leads to lethargy—it’s that the new material added to these stories is almost uniformly clichéd.
It’s padding of the most banal and unnecessary sort, and Man on Fire (April 30) suffers from this malady to a fatal degree. Stretching its source in ways that are unoriginal and insufferable, it stands as proof positive of this streaming strategy’s misguidedness.
Whereas Tony Scott’s Denzel Washington-headlined 2004 thriller Man on Fire clocked in at a hefty 146 minutes, Netflix’s seven-part adaptation of A.J. Quinnell’s 1980 book takes a whopping five-and-a-half hours to tell its tale about a downtrodden Special Forces vet who gets a shot at redemption by caring for a young girl.
That extra time is largely spent on extraneous subplots, dull supporting characters, snoozy set pieces, and foreseeable twists, with showrunner Kyle Killen inflating his saga with elements that were old hat three decades ago.
The result is a lose-lose proposition, adding much but providing far less bang for one’s buck.
Scott’s film boasted Washington, Christopher Walken, Mickey Rourke, and Dakota Fanning at the height of her adolescent power. The new Man on Fire boasts a far less illustrious cast led by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, a fine actor (fresh off the sturdy Wonder Man) who’s asked to hit one tortured-angry note over and over in the hope that it’ll eventually ring true. It doesn’t, as his John Creasy, four years after a mission gone awry, is a PTSD-wracked mess whose life and career are in shambles.
Creasy sleeps with a hood over his head (in an echo of his mates’ demise) and tries to kill himself by driving into a bridge pillar. He survives and is then given a second chance by old mate Rayburn (Bobby Cannavale), who takes him to Rio de Janeiro, where he now lives with his family.
[WARNING: Minor spoilers follow]
Despite Creasy being a boozy headcase with diminished skills, Rayburn helps get him back on his feet by working security for a series of construction projects that Brazilian President Carmo (Billy Blanco Jr.) believes might be targets for terrorists.
As it turns out, the bad guys blow up Rayburn’s apartment building with him and his family inside, save for his sixteen-year-old daughter Poe (Billie Boullet), who witnesses the explosion after crossing paths with (and seeing the face of) the perpetrator. This puts her in grave danger, and it’s up to Creasy to protect her—a mission that dovetails nicely with his hunger for vengeance.
Abdul-Mateen’s physicality and fury can’t change the fact that Creasy is a bland avenger, and unlike in Scott’s film, there’s no serious religious component to his quest for salvation. Rather, he’s just a scarred killer motivated by circumstances to pick himself up off the proverbial floor and get back to his lethal business.
To do that, he enlists the aid of Valeria Melo (Alice Braga), a car service driver with experience “finding things” who becomes his de facto right-hand woman, offering him assistance and intel. Because she witnessed Creasy take down muggers and covets immigration papers for herself and her daughter, Melo is eager to collaborate and quickly introduces Creasy to her cousin, who operates the unofficial police force in the favelas.
To fill out its runtime, Man on Fire gives Creasy various folks to partner with. Courtesy of Melo, there’s wimpy Livro (Jeferson Baptista) and roughneck Vico (Iago Xavier), who eventually decide to throw their lot in with Creasy because, well, why not. There’s also Ivan (Alex Ozerov-Meyer), a Russian buddy who appears out of the blue to furnish Creasy with all kinds of handy support. And there’s Creasy’s old CIA contact Henry Tappen (Scoot McNairy), who’s back in the States and oh-so-very concerned about the rogue former agent’s rampage through Rio in search of the bombing’s perpetrators.
Man on Fire’s first two episodes are helmed by Creed II and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts director Stephen J. Caple, although you wouldn’t know it from the action’s perfunctory visuals and staging. At least the series was partially shot on location, which gives it some colorful energy. That’s not enough, however, to overshadow the dreariness of its every step, with Creasy bonding with Poe (a process that involves a meaningful penny and talk about chess) as he slowly makes his way up the criminal ladder, torturing adversaries for information and executing them with extreme prejudice.
There are shades of Scott’s feature in the sight of Creasy walking away from explosions in slow-motion (because, you see, he’s a man on fire), as well as in his surrogate-dad relationship with Poe. Yet it all feels like a cheaper, less polished reproduction.
This is the Temu version of Man on Fire, and it mainly differentiates itself from its predecessor by reconfiguring its plot into a hackneyed retread of countless prior action thrillers. Creasy defends the innocent and punishes the wicked via a cavalcade of amazing feats, all as his enemies fret and fume about his peerless special-ops prowess, and he grapples with PTSD that, naturally, always manifests at the most inopportune times.
Almost as unsurprising as Man on Fire’s predictability is its gloominess. As with so many Netflix offerings, Killen’s show suggests that the sole line item the streamer refuses to splurge on is lighting. Ostensibly cast in darkness because this is such a grim affair, it proceeds from one overcast locale to the next, its dimness reflected by its supporting characters’ habit of doing dumb things that will obviously put themselves in jeopardy.
Then again, there’s nothing realistic about any of this, as evidenced by Melo transforming, over the course of a few short weeks, from a glorified Uber driver to a tactical mastermind who’s perfectly comfortable donning disguises, breaking into heavily guarded facilities, and surviving firefights.
After much running, driving, shooting, strangling, and tussling, Man on Fire wraps up its conspiratorial mayhem with a tidy bow and lays the groundwork for a second season. In light of this derivative maiden outing, let’s hope that idea goes up in flames.
