Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in Netflix Adaptation

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.

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.

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 (Iago Xavier); and, from back in the States, Henry Tappan (Scoot McNairy), a CIA official who previously partnered with Creasy and Paul. They’re all immersed in a multi-layered conspiracy, but really they’re getting to know each other and staging elaborate heists and infiltrations in the name of revenge. As you do.

Netflix’s Man on Fire is neither an exact adaptation of the book/movies nor a sequel or prequel. It’s better described as “something with some of the same vibes as the previous properties.” There’s the brooding, damaged Creasy, who confusingly passes out at inopportune moments owing to his trauma; an international setting (Italy in the book and first film, Mexico City in the 2004 movie); and a young woman who breaks through his defenses and teaches him to feel again. But the actual plot and nature of the revenge are new — or “new,” because it would be foolish to think anything in Man on Fire is fresh.

Man on Fire, originally ordered as eight episodes and feeling both over-extended and rushed at seven, becomes a string of proficient-yet-forgettable set pieces orchestrated by the directors — Creed II helmer Steve Caple Jr. handles the first two episodes — in one abandoned warehouse setting after another, eventually making room for a home invasion, a prison break and more, without ever becoming distinctive. The series was shot in Mexico and Brazil, but too often that just means “We’ve got a drone shot of the favelas!” or “Don’t forget that Rio has pretty beaches!” Too many recent thrillers have used South and Central American locations better for me to list them all; ditto recent thrillers that have had meaningful things to say about their South and Central American settings beyond “Sometimes Americans meddle in international politics.”

There are a few fight scenes, with Abdul-Mateen nailing a style that seems to be “rusty but lethal,” plus lots of torture that might make you cringe if you’re squeamish about such things. But nothing lingers. As I thought back over the sequences in which Creasy pummels assorted Brazilian civilians strapped to chairs and whatnot, I tried to remember anything specific he got out of them (not that Man on Fire is making any sort of moral point about enhanced interrogation). Sometimes torture is just cool, like walking away from an exploding building in slo-mo, something Creasy does without irony. Just as it’s apparently cool when Creasy sets bad guys on fire and quips, “Who’s the man on fire now, sparky?” (For clarity, he does the former, but does not say the latter.)

It’s just that Creasy doesn’t offer much else. Killen’s construction of the season one arc doesn’t let the character show off any plausible ingenuity or expertise. Every once in a while he’s just like, “Yeah, I sewed an explosive device into your chest and I have a detonator” and you’re just supposed to be like, “Sure you did, John Creasy,” rather than wondering why we weren’t given any indication of how he did it or what talents he possesses. Abdul-Mateen’s performance is perpetually glum, but insufficiently monomaniacal, lowering the stakes throughout.

That’s something you have to sacrifice if you want to make it believable that a motley crew of Brazilian randos would form around Creasy. Man on Fire doesn’t really do that either. The assembling of the team is arbitrary, as are their skill sets. They’re just available and willing to help.

As much as I appreciated that there was no attempt to shoehorn a romantic subplot into the story for Braga’s Melo, she’s merely a convenient way for Creasy to meet other Brazilians, present but entirely lacking in personality. Boullet’s Poe is, unfortunately, even worse, just the latest in an apparently endless string of prestige cable teens who exist only to be placed in inopportune jeopardy. She isn’t worse than the Kim Bauer/Dana Brody archetype, but nobody ever tried saying Kim Bauer or Dana Brody were the leads in 24 or Homeland, while Poe is the second biggest role in Man on Fire and yet adds almost nothing. I don’t even think the Tony Scott movie is very good, but darned if Dakota Fanning doesn’t give a performance that makes you understand how this one little girl could have helped John Creasy temporarily feel human again.

McNairy and Cannavale both give the impression of showing up on set and being Scoot McNairy and Bobby Cannavale, which isn’t a bad thing because both actors always class up whatever joint they’re in. But they could have swapped roles without changing either role or the overall quality of the show. They’re not inherently fungible actors, but insufficient writing was done to make either break a sweat.

My two favorite performances come from Baptista and Xavier, young actors I’ve never seen before and the only two playing characters whose arcs aren’t wholly predictable.

It doesn’t feel spoiler-y to say that Man on Fire sets itself up for future seasons, but it’s harder to tell which parts of Creasy’s crew will be back.

I just hope he remembers this valuable lesson: Revenge is a dish best served with an accompanying caipirinha and a table full of friends.