The problem with turning successful movies into long-form TV series isn’t just that it leads to lethargy—it’s that the new material added to these stories is almost uniformly clichéd.
It’s padding of the most banal and unnecessary sort, and Man on Fire (April 30) suffers from this malady to a fatal degree. Stretching its source in ways that are unoriginal and insufferable, it stands as proof positive of this streaming strategy’s misguidedness.
Whereas Tony Scott’s Denzel Washington-headlined 2004 thriller Man on Fire clocked in at a hefty 146 minutes, Netflix’s seven-part adaptation of A.J. Quinnell’s 1980 book takes a whopping five-and-a-half hours to tell its tale about a downtrodden Special Forces vet who gets a shot at redemption by caring for a young girl.
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