The movies have adapted A.J. Quinnell’s novel “Man on Fire” and his tragic protagonist Marcus Creasy from page to screen three times since the book’s release in 1980: first in 1987, directed by Élie Chouraqui and starring Scott Glenn; then again in 2004, directed by Tony Scott and starring Denzel Washington; and one more time in 2005, repackaged as “Ek Ajnabee,” directed by Apoorva Lakhia and starring Amitabh Bachchan. No matter the year, whatever the culture, if a winsome girl gives an alcoholic and embittered ex-soldier permission to live anew, and if that girl is kidnapped by the era’s villains du jour, Creasy arises to wreak vengeance on them. Them’s the rules.
With each new actor and each new interpretation, Creasy gets a name change, too. He’s Christian in Chouraqui’s film, Surya in Lakhia’s, and John in Scott’s. Importantly, and even tellingly, Kyle Killen sticks with “John” in his Netflix series, suggesting that over time, Scott and Washington’s take on the character has metastasized into the definitive one–a Black American antihero for unheroic times, being the aughts and the mid-2020s, where at least some flavor of heroism is dearly needed. Killen’s leading man for the Netflix show is Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, one of the few young performers of the day capable of matching Washington’s energy: cool, calm, detached, but underneath, yearning to reattach himself to a cause or a collective after years spent living unmoored from both.
Abdul-Mateen’s Creasy aches for purpose. He wants to make a difference. As such, he’s unexpectedly reflective of the 2026 American condition, sans the spycraft, suspicion, and casual violence Creasy deploys as he carries out his mission: to win some justice for his friend, Paul Rayburn (Bobby Cannavale), and for Paul’s daughter, Poe (Billie Boullet), left orphaned in the show’s first episode. In the series’ present, Creasy is a tipsy, suicidal wreck; in its past, captured in a prologue as the story kicks off, he was an accomplished, confident, preternaturally skilled military operative, whom we meet on a mission that goes awry and ends with his unit’s execution. Creasy takes their deaths poorly. Fast forward to now, and Paul holds out a hand to drag Creasy out of despondency with a job offer.
That job likewise takes a bleak turn when Paul’s apartment building is unceremoniously blown up, and he, his wife, and their two sons, along with it. Only Poe and Creasy survive. “Man on Fire” builds its narrative on his efforts to protect her in the attack’s aftermath, knowing full well that Poe’s survival means she’s in mortal danger; the blunt force horror of the bombing and the urgency of Poe’s circumstances jar Creasy out of his PTSD-fueled stupor, and he bends himself toward the dual goals of safeguarding the girl while tracking down her family’s killers, and maybe, just maybe, cobbling together a found family for himself along the way.
Like the Scott film, and the Chouraqui film, and the Lakhia film–Killen’s series roots its thrills in the “how” of it all: how he’s going to uncover the guilty parties, how he’s going to exact his retribution, how he’s going to get out of one jam before the next one’s dolloped on his plate. More to the point, that’s the soul of the exercise, and the reason we’re tuning into the show in the first place. “Man on Fire” is grounded in revenge cinema, fixated upon both the mechanics of revenge and the existential toll seeking it takes on a person. But it’s a spy-versus-spy paranoiac conspiracy thriller, too. Where Scott unleashes Creasy on child traffickers in Mexico City, Killen sets his sights on domestic terrorists, twisting and turning the narrative’s political intrigue into a knottier chain of causation.
Savvy viewers might untangle those links faster than Creasy can. “Man on Fire” is nothing if not formulaic; if a character is introduced who has a problem with Creasy from their first scene together, then there’s probably a reason why. But plot predictability is less of an obstacle for the show and more of an expectation of its genre. Killen dutifully stokes suspense in each episode, seemingly aware that in craft terms, “suspense” means knowing what’s going to happen in a movie or a series, while getting caught up in its particulars all the same. If you’ve seen political action thrillers of any stripe, you’ve seen at least a few of “Man on Fire’s” plot beats before. The key is that Killen, his writers, and his cast all enjoy the process so thoroughly that no amount of foreknowledge short of reading Wikipedia can fully spoil the experience of watching Creasy stay a step ahead of the bad guys while walking in lockstep with his demons.
Abdul-Mateen brings big-screen movie star presence to just about every project he touches, whether an actual movie or a streaming series; see “Wonder Man,” or go back to “The Get Down,” his first major role, a Netflix ensemble production in which he plays a key antagonist and years later remains one of its most memorable elements. The camera loves him. He loves the camera. It’s hard to tell who loves whom more. Regardless, he was born to act in front of the lens, so even in something as small-scale as “Man on Fire,” he gives his all to the part. Abdul-Mateen’s Creasy is considerably more haunted than Washington’s, which one could claim as evidential of the difference between long and short-form storytelling: “Man on Fire,” the movie, is only 140 minutes long, where “Man on Fire,” the series, is more than twice that amount, which means Abdul-Mateen enjoys more opportunities to flesh out Creasy as a man than Washington did. That’s barroom napkin math, folks.
But Abdul-Mateen invests in Creasy’s survivor’s guilt with faraway gazes while dominating compositions with his considerable frame. It’s not that Creasy, the character, means to take up emotional space everywhere he goes as much as Killen and Abdul-Mateen want their audience to stay keenly aware of Creasy’s distress for the sake of the stakes. If Washington’s Creasy is an unstoppable (and, frankly, creative) killing machine, Abdul-Mateen humanizes the character: we wonder if he’ll manage to outwit his enemies as much as how, because boy do the deaths of his old unit weigh on him; in his scenes with Boullet, where Creasy is called on as a source of comfort rather than a stone cold badass, we might worry that he’s unequipped for the task, so burdened as he is by his own grief. Abdul-Mateen pulls us into his work as a necessary component of maintaining tension, pairing well with his co-stars, from Boullet to Alice Braga, playing Creasy’s driver and eventual ragtag team member, as he contrasts that humanity with requisite action athleticism.
Like characters played by his contemporaries, a la Alan Ritchson, one gets the immediate impression that receiving threats from Creasy is preferable to taking a punch from him. There’s no misapprehending the lengths he’ll go to for the mission, or for Poe’s safety. But Abdul-Mateen brings so much else besides to the character that, slight as the story may be, a future second season of “Man on Fire” feels well-deserved. [B]
Boston-based pop culture critic who has been writing about film and television online since 2009, with bylines at Paste Magazine, Slant, The Hollywood Reporter, Polygon, and The Playlist. A member of the Online Film Critics Society and the Boston Online Film Critics Association.
