Not to be mistaken with the remake of the same name with Denzel Washington, Man On Fire’s source material is a tale of a military professional who has fought too long and witnessed too much. I haven’t read it, but it seems like a decent beach read which I consider a genre onto itself.

Yet I’m not talking about the remake or the novel, but the original film. It certainly feels like it has some possibilities with Scott Glenn playing the burnt out soldier Creasy. For roughly half the duration, I thought his name was Greasy. That bothered me until my medicated self understood I was mishearing the dialog. I blame the film to streaming transfer. Never my bud, bud, because plants don’t fight. Since I was a man on weed (thank you to my new favorite strain Cherry Runtz), I was ready for anything…except this movie.

The film opens with a dead main character narrating, giving a real Sunset Boulevard vibe. It flips into flashback mode to get us caught up. Glenn does his signature thousand yard stare making Creasy look truly dead inside. One of his ex-military buddies, played by Joe Pesci, helps set him up with a cushy gig protecting a tween age daughter from a wealthy & connected family. She works very hard to befriend our PTSD man of action. When she finally does breakthrough to him, the cringe factor goes from mild to grooming.

Enchanted Creasy comes across like an infatuated teenage boy who figured out how to remove a bra. And this weird radiating of love makes him terrible at the job he was hired to do. Eventually, she’s kidnapped and we get a killer Creasy on the rampage to get the girl back. Some stunning scenes in this include Joe Pesci’s hair as well as a hair raising scene of him playing acoustic guitar and singing. We are a long, long way from GoodFellas.

I don’t want to completely spoiler everything in the film, but it definitely made me feel something.