‘Man on Fire’ Is Burning Up the Netflix Top 10 Thanks To Tony Scott’s Definitive 2000s Flair

If he had done nothing else, the late, great filmmaker Tony Scott would be remembered for directing Top Gun, the most enduring of Tom Cruise vehicles and a defining action movie of the 1980s. But really, Scott’s blockbuster career had three distinct phases, neatly meted out more or less by decade. From the ’80s through 1991’s The Last Boy Scout, he primarily made star vehicles crossing athletics with law-enforcement. From 1993 through 2001, he focused less on traditional action heroics, often riffing on ’70s movies for projects like True Romance (a lovers-on-the-run crime picture that goes so far as to use score from Badlands), The Fan (featuring Robert De Niro doing a Taxi Driver variation), and Enemy of the State (with Gene Hackman unofficially reprising Harry Caul from The Conversation). Scott’s third and final phase kicked off with 2004’s Man on Fire, which has been sitting high atop the Netflix Top 10 charts for some weeks now. This was the beginning of Tony Scott’s baroque green period.

Man on Fire is not my personal favorite Tony Scott movie from this period or elsewhere. It’s also not my favorite Scott collaboration with Denzel Washington, who appeared in many of his green-period films. I’m partial to Déjà Vu and Unstoppable, the latter of which was recently acclaimed by Quentin Tarantino as the seventh- best movie of the 21st century so far. But I must admit that it’s Man on Fire that boasts the longest tail of Scott’s final run of films.

At the time, it was Washington’s first movie with Scott in nearly a decade. He plays Creasy, an alcoholic ex-Marine who takes a job as the bodyguard of young Pita (Dakota Fanning in her child-star years), the daughter of a wealthy auto magnate living in Mexico. The pair form an unlikely bond, and when Pita is indeed kidnapped, Creasy goes on a rampage, attempting to get her back and/or exact revenge. Or, as Creasy’s friend Rayburn (Christopher Walken) memorably puts it, with that imitable but unequaled Walken cadence: “Creasy’s art is death. And he’s about to paint his masterpiece.”

Painting is exactly what Scott is up to in Man on Fire. His flashy, quick-cut, saturated-color style had been developing for decades at this point, but this movie goes particularly hard on his smeariest, speed-varying, surveillance-state kaleidoscope vision. Scott mixes a variety of colors with his blown-out whites and grainy shadows, but the most prominent is green, a motif in a lot of his late-period work. (If nothing else, it’s a nice break from the yellow-and-brown tints so many 2000s filmmakers used to depict Mexico.)

This is also the most Tony Scott. One weird omission from the Netflix version of the movie: Scott’s stylized subtitles for the Spanish dialogue, which in the original cut jump around the screen, shifting size and sometimes font for emphasis, simply aren’t included. You can either watch the mostly-English movies with subtitles turned on (to see the translations from Spanish) or with nothing at all (which renders several full scenes hard to comprehend for anyone who doesn’t speak Spanish).

Even without those touches, at nearly two-and-a-half-hours Man on Fire is Scott’s longest movie, and most deliberately paced, given his typically frenetic presentation. Unlike a lot of similarly themed thrillers that seem downright eager to feed their characters to the wolves to expedite the violent revenge process, Man on Fire takes its time to develop the relationship between Creasy and Pita. (There is far more of Denzel playing swim coach than you might expect.) Pita isn’t endangered until the 50-minute mark, when Scott unleashes one of his strongest sequences: a jittery shoot-out and kidnapping sequence where the constant cuts, replays, and handheld camera bobs all serve the impressionistic whole, depicting Creasy’s darting professionalism and emotional panic over the situation.

Of course, the running time still leaves an entire feature film’s worth of time for Creasy to storm across Mexico. This is both the material that has made Man on Fire famous and what threatens to turn the movie into gruesome overkill. Perhaps befitting the film sharing a release year with the first Saw movie (and, moreover, a decade of US. entanglements overseas), Creasy’s vengeance and interrogations have a pro-torture bent. He cuts off fingers, sticks C4 up a guy’s ass, shoots tons of guys, and blows up a rave (albeit to the cheers of the crowd who has been evacuated first). His, ah, advanced interrogation techniques basically always work; it’s a fantasy of new American might, embodied by Washington’s fiery insistence.

This makes Man on Fire feel both less suspenseful and less timeless than the other Washington/Scott pictures, which often use their genres to nod at classic movie craftsmanship, and offer a more subtly conflicted version of Washington’s persona. This collaboration is straight out of 2004, in Scott’s style and the story’s substance. But there’s value in that, too. Scott’s movies are known for their visceral immediacy, which means he was able to capture aspects of the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s with equal aplomb. Man on Fire reps a certain kind of lurid post-9/11 righteousness with queasy perfection.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream Man on Fire on Netflix