There's Only One Denzel

There are some great bad-ass actors in the world: Schwarzenegger in the first two Terminator movies, Keanu Reeves in the Matrix films, Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road and Atomic Blonde, Angelina Jolie in Wanted. And there are some cool actors: Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, McConaughey occasionally, Brad Pitt occasionally, Robert Downey Jr., and maybe Tom Holland.

But there aren’t a lot of actors who are both bad-ass and cool: Sam Jackson, maybe Bruce Willis at his peak, sometimes Jason Statham. But there’s one who rises above all the rest when you consider that cool, bad-ass combo: Denzel MF’ing Washington. No man is as equally cool and as bad-ass as Denzel. It’s just facts. And only a man as cool and as bad-ass as Denzel can elevate standard action fare into something genuinely, inexplicably watchable. Denzel does it all the damn time in The Equalizer movies, 2 Guns, Safe House, Unstoppable, and arguably even Training Day. The man spins gold out of worn copper. A paint-by-numbers script is no impediment to the powers of Denzel.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II? This man is bad-ass. That is not up for debate. But cool? With all due respect, he is not in Denzel’s league. Oh, he can blow some sh*t up alright. But can he walk away from the fire with the coolness of Angela Bassett in Waiting to Exhale? No, no he cannot. Denzel can do both, and sadly, that is what separates Denzel’s 2004 Man on Fire from Abdul-Mateen’s 2026 Netflix series of the same name. Both are middle-of-the-road action projects elevated by the intensity of their leads, but only Denzel’s Man on Fire crackles with that ineffable, irreplaceable energy. Denzel energy. It goes BOOM.

Abdul-Mateen can break a neck, beat someone to a pulp, and save the day. But Yahya can’t go BOOM. And Netflix’s Man on Fire is all the worse for it. I mean, it’s fine. There’s some bloat in the middle, but it mostly gets the job done in a TNT “Men Who Like Movies” kind of way. But it lacks soul. There’s no swagger. There’s no Denzel to drag it to the next level. It ain’t got no BOOM.

For the record: It follows John Creasy, a former mercenary haunted by PTSD from a mission that got all his men killed. His buddy Paul Rayburn (Bobby Cannavale) pulls him out of retirement to protect someone or other in Rio de Janeiro. Unfortunately, Rayburn and his wife are killed when a terrorist organization blows up their hotel. Rayburn’s daughter, Poe, was out being a teenager when it happened — but she did spot one of the men responsible. So Creasy is out for revenge while protecting his dead buddy’s kid. And they stretch a two-hour plot across seven episodes that should’ve been five. That’s the gist. Alice Braga is also along for the ride as an Uber driver who gets swept up in it all, Scoot McNairy plays a government agent overseeing the investigation into the terrorist group, and there are various other people who mostly exist to drive up the body count.

I didn’t hate it. Some of it I even found entertaining, and the last two episodes manage to graduate from C-action fare to something closer to B. Creator Kyle Killen has done more interesting work (Lone Star, Awake), but he’s also clearly learned that interesting doesn’t move the algorithm as reliably as basic does — and Man on Fire is fairly basic, notwithstanding how genuinely bad-ass Yahya Abdul-Mateen is. The coolness just isn’t there. And in the end, coolness is the whole thing. It’s what separates a show you watch from one you feel.