A box-ticking reboot of a not-great Denzel Washington movie leads our reviews this week, plus a delightfully deadpan Japanese action-comedy, a long-awaited Saoirse Ronan film and the reappearance of a cult Australian comedy.
Man on Fire ★★ (Netflix)
Does being deemed “adequate” make a show a success nowadays? Sometimes it seems like that’s all a streaming series aspires to. Setting a low bar, whether through expediency or lack of self-belief, is a worrying trend, and that’s definitely the case with this action-thriller. Liberally rebooting a property that was previously a 2004 Denzel Washington movie, these seven episodes about a broken soldier rediscovering his spirit and killing instincts too often do barely enough. Man on Fire ticks plenty of boxes, but they’re not great ones.
Played with stern commitment by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Watchmen), John Creasy is a former elite American soldier and CIA operative who has spent four years in a self-destructive spiral after his team were executed on a mission. He can barely hold it together when an old friend and colleague, Paul Rayburn (Bobby Cannavale), brings him to Brazil as a consultant to a government fearful of terrorist attacks during an election. Creasy soon has a primal motivation and someone to protect, Rayburn’s teenage daughter Poe (Billie Boullet).
Man on Fire is not a good film. It was the second Hollywood adaptation of AJ Quinnell’s 1980s pulp bestseller, exhibiting both garish and xenophobic instincts. But it had an exceptional performance (nine-year-old Dakota Fanning as a kidnap victim), and an accomplished performance (Washington’s vengeful bodyguard). Denzel’s Creasy had a cold, purposeful wrath, a self-immolating samurai, but those edges are shaved off for Abdul-Mateen II. There are individual scenes that speak to trauma and emotional reckoning, but they don’t linger on the storytelling. They’re punctuation.
We’re in the territory of The Night Agent, an existing Netflix success in this genre. With Mexico City standing in for Brazil, creator Kyle Killen (Halo) mixes political machinations, investigatory twists, and covert plans. Creasy accumulates offsiders, and there’s more Fast Five – also set in Brazil – than Reacher to this narrative. Alice Braga thankfully helps ground the show as Valeria Melo, a driver who helps Creasy and brings the country’s hillside favelas (informal, self-regulated enclaves) into blunt focus.
But if Man on Fire hedges the spiritual reckoning and sprinkles familiar influences, there’s no excuse for fumbling what should be its unshakeable foundation. The action set-pieces lack a distinctive vitality and their execution are short on inspiration – an episode that finds Creasy and his crew infiltrating a Brazilian jail to reach a target defies plausibility. It has an A-Team slickness. The breaking point? Creasy doing the cold stroll toward the camera as he sets off a fiery explosion in his wake. You can’t succeed by making do with cliches.
Baby Assassins Everyday! ★★★½ (HBO Max)
This is my current screen palate cleanser: a delightfully deadpan Japanese action-comedy about a pair of young women trying to make the most of their precarious foothold on the gig economy ladder. Granted, best friends Chisato Sugimoto (Akari Takaishi) and Mahiro Fukugawa (Saori Izawa) are not delivery drivers. Instead, they’re contract killers, taking out targets while listing their favourite dishes and grumbling about having to cover a colleague’s poorly-timed shift.
Created by Yugo Sakamoto, the Baby Assassins franchise has spawned three successful films in Japan since debuting in 2021. This 12-part spin-off series plays like a Gen Z update of Two Broke Girls, infused with some Killing Eve and La Femme Nikita. It’s fun, but in unpredictable ways. Chisato and, in particular, Mahiro struggle with the fiddly admin details of their covert wet work, but when called upon to fight a kitchen full of gangster chefs they deliver giddily creative martial arts mayhem.
The season is a mix of job-of-the-week problem-solving and an overarching narrative about the duo getting entwined with a shadowy organisation. Its commentary on generational inequality only gets sharper when the duo is advised by a handler to get legit cover jobs – they struggle in the conventional workplace and come home to lament their financial struggles over bowls of pork miso soup. For a wild fantasy, this show is certainly timely.
The Outrun ★★★★½ (Netflix)
Finally on streaming, this flinty drama was one of the best films of 2024. It’s headlined by a compelling Saoirse Ronan, who turns expectations inside out as Rona, a biology student felled by alcoholism, who leaves London for her home and separated parents in Scotland’s remote Orkney Islands after a rehab stint. German filmmaker Nora Fingscheidt offers a fierce sense of place – roiling aquatic greens, harsh skies – that is connected to Rona’s seesawing recovery. The cliches of addiction stories are sidestepped, leaving something profound but also deeply personal. You can feel the scar tissue.
Criminal Record ★★★½ (Apple TV)
The second season of this London policing thriller, which is all helter-skelter urban consequences and flawed systems, subtly shifts the focus between its two Metropolitan Police protagonists. Young detective June Lenker (Cush Jumbo) is no longer covertly investigating her veteran superior Daniel Hegarty (Peter Capaldi), but their every interaction is riven by differences in age, rank and background. It’s a terrific showcase for both leads, who are working at the murky point where far-right political groups embrace politically motivated violence. This kind of gritty specificity is rare for Apple TV – some more would be welcome.
Watson ★★½ (Paramount+)
Farewell to this bonkers American procedural, which set out to combine Sherlock Holmes lore with the medical mysteries of House and lasted two seasons before being cancelled. The reliable Morris Chestnut (Nurse Jackie) was a contemporary Dr John Watson, who after the mysterious death (yeah, sure) of his friend Holmes is running a diagnostic clinic in Pittsburgh that helps those the hospital system has no answers for. It was something of a mess, and lacked House’s sense of mischief, but I did occasionally appreciate the show’s smash-it-together ambition.
Wilfred ★★★½ (Binge)
A year shy of two decades since it debuted on SBS, both seasons of this idiosyncratic Australian comedy have a new streaming home. A study of how flawed behaviour can become the comfortable – and suddenly uncomfortable – norm, Jason Gann and Adam Zwar’s show was full of idiosyncrasies. One was shooting on 16mm film, another was Gann wearing an animal suit to play the titular role, a larrikin dog living with owner Sarah (Cindy Waddingham) and her underemployed boyfriend Adam (Zwar), who finds he can converse with Wilfred. The earthy inventiveness is still strong.
Want more TV? We’ve got you.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
