When Netflix first unveiled Man on Fire I found it more than a little surprising that it was taking a cult favourite Denzel Washington movie and turning it into an action-packed streaming series, but the more I see of it, the more it starts to make sense. Casting the excellent Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is the first in a few excellent decisions the showrunners have made, for one.
After a teaser trailer dropped in mid-March, we've now been given another look at the show, in the form of a quick action sequence that presumably happens fairly early on in the season. It shows our main character, John Creasy, coordinating what should be a straightforward job, until things start to go drastically wrong.
Creasy is supposed to be a high-level operator who's compromised only by his severe PTSD from events that we'll doubtless learn more about over time, and that's led him to the private sector. Here he works for whoever will pay him, trading on the reputation he's built from previous security jobs and other work.
So, when we see this infiltration go very wrong, with masked attackers taking all of Creasy's colleagues captive before they can even kick off their plan, that's not a good thing. We then see Creasy get attacked by his own set of assailants, although he's able to fight them off in impressive, improvisational style.
Obviously, this isn't a huge amount to go on (and I do sometimes wish Netflix's sneak peeks ran just a little longer than they do), but it's still a pretty encouraging glimpse at the sort of action scene that Man on Fire might bring to the table. It also clearly evokes the sort of gun fu chess that has become so popular in action movies since the John Wick franchise made it massive.
That movie's influence is now fairly outsized, and I think it's clearly in evidence in this short sneak peek, so it'll be fascinating to see how the full series builds on that when it comes out on 30 April.
