'Man on Fire' Review: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in Netflix Adaptation
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as John Creasy in 'Man on Fire.'
Courtesy of Netflix © 2025
-
Share on Facebook
-
Share on X
-
Google Preferred
-
Share to Flipboard
-
Show additional share options
-
Share on LinkedIn
-
Share on Pinterest
-
Share on Reddit
-
Share on Tumblr
-
Share on Whats App
-
Send an Email
-
Print the Article
-
Post a Comment
Logo text
It’s hard for men of a certain age to make new friends.
Don’t believe me? Ask HBO’s DTF St. Louis, in which the quest for a simpatico bro very quickly comes to involve murder, infidelity and Jamba Juice. It’s a very long way to go for the characters played by Jason Bateman and David Harbour just to find a fellow dude willing to go on recumbent biking trips or share workout tips, but the result is one of the spring’s best TV shows.
Man on Fire
The Bottom Line
Turns a monomaniacal payback story into a slack team-up thriller.
Airdate: Thursday, April 30 (Netflix)
Cast: Yahya Abdul Mateen, Billie Boullet, Bobby Cannavale, Alice Braga, Scoot McNairy, Paul
Ben-Victor
Creator: Kyle Killen
In Netflix‘s Man on Fire, Special Forces-trained mercenary John Creasy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) finds an even more unorthodox pretext for assembling a group of chums for cooking montages, long walks by the Brazilian beach and personal salvation: extrajudicial revenge.
Related Stories
TV
Netflix Picks Up Taiwanese Male Escort Dramedy 'A Controversial Entertainer' (Exclusive)
TV
'Smiling Friends' Creator Sets Animated Series 'Dad's House' at Netflix
In the seven-episode semi-adaptation of A.J. Quinnell’s novel, John Creasy learns that the best revenge truly is the friends we made along the way.
This is sure to be perplexing for fans of the 1980 book or two previous adaptations, in which the highly trained and unrepentantly brutal Creasy was played by Scott Glenn and Denzel Washington. At the core of the story is the certainty that revenge, while occasionally satisfying on a gut level, is corrosive to the soul and not, in fact, a reliable way to meet lifelong pals.
Perhaps previous adapters were simply more inward-looking and less franchise-driven than Kyle Killen, creator and writer of Netflix’s series. There’s little in this Man on Fire that will speak to the small subset of viewers who loved Killen’s short-lived Lone Star and Awake, but there’s a lot that will appeal to the far larger set of viewers who loved shows like The Night Agent and two-thirds of the recent dramas on Amazon.
This Man on Fire isn’t designed to be a complex, brutal, nihilistic portrait of vigilantism and violence. It’s a weirdly upbeat, disappointingly bland set-up for an ongoing series about a damaged mercenary and his unlikely, poorly developed Scooby Gang. Accepted on those limitedly aspirational and rarely convincing terms, but few others, it succeeds.
We’re introduced to Abdul-Mateen’s Creasy at the tail end of a Mexico City operation to do…dunno. Doesn’t matter. He’s running an operation with a small group of fellow mercenaries, men he’s clearly close to, even if the five-minute opening isn’t enough time to get a feeling for what sort of friends these guys are — much less the sort of man Creasy is or was before the operation goes pear-shaped and all of Creasy’s men are killed.
Four years later, Creasy is haunted. In a handy montage — Man on Fire is packed with handy montages — we see that Creasy’s life is a steady routine of nightmare-drenched sleep, day-drinking and disinterested labor in a warehouse job. Imagining an eternity of this, Creasy disables his car’s braking system and drives into a concrete pylon.
When Creasy wakes up, he’s in a hospital bed and his long-time mentor, friend and colleague-in-the-trenches Paul Rayburn (Bobby Cannavale) is by his side. Rayburn says he needs a man like Creasy — Alcoholic? Suicidal? Suffering from debilitating PTSD? — to join him down in Brazil, where he’s handling security on the eve of an election plagued by escalating terrorist threats.
So it’s off to Rio, accompanied by what Netflix’s subtitling calls “pensive Brazilian conga music” (because John Creasy isn’t ready for a playful samba). Everybody, including the president’s stern chief of security (Thomas Aquino), is skeptical of Creasy’s preparedness for the job, but Paul welcomes Creasy to multiple dinners with his family, including sullen teenage daughter Poe (Billie Boullet).
It doesn’t take long for Something Bad to happen and for Creasy to be put on a path for revenge, reluctantly accompanied by Poe and an assortment of supporting Brazilian characters, including ride share driver Melo (Alice Braga); her sensitive cousin from the favela, Livro (Jefferson Baptista); bullying mid-level gang member Vico (I