While his legacy in cinema is vast, the late Tony Scott is perhaps best known for directing the iconic Top Gun, a film that became synonymous with Tom Cruise’s career and defined action movies in the 1980s. However, Scott’s illustrious career can be divided into three distinct phases, each marking a decade of evolution. During the late ’80s up until 1991’s The Last Boy Scout, Scott was known for crafting star-studded films that intertwined sports with crime-fighting elements. Between 1993 and 2001, he shifted his focus, taking inspiration from ’70s cinema to create films like True Romance, a crime story reminiscent of Badlands, and The Fan, featuring Robert De Niro in a role echoing Taxi Driver. This period also included Enemy of the State, with Gene Hackman channeling his character from The Conversation. Scott’s final chapter began in 2004 with Man on Fire, a film currently topping Netflix’s charts, marking the start of his visually distinct “green period.”

Although Man on Fire is not my top choice among Tony Scott’s works or his collaborations with Denzel Washington, it stands out as a significant film from his later years. Personally, I favor Déjà Vu and Unstoppable, the latter of which Quentin Tarantino has praised as one of the best films of the 21st century so far. Still, it is Man on Fire that has left a lasting impression from Scott’s final phase of filmmaking.

In Man on Fire, Denzel Washington returns to work with Scott after nearly a decade. He portrays Creasy, a troubled ex-Marine who becomes the bodyguard of Pita, a young girl played by Dakota Fanning during her early acting years. Pita is the daughter of a prosperous auto industry figure in Mexico, and as the story unfolds, she and Creasy form a deep connection. When Pita is kidnapped, Creasy embarks on a relentless quest to rescue her and seek vengeance. As Christopher Walken’s character Rayburn aptly describes, “Creasy’s art is death. And he’s about to paint his masterpiece.”

Scott’s direction in Man on Fire is akin to an artist at work. By this time, his signature style of quick cuts and vibrant color saturation had matured, and the film showcases his mastery with its kaleidoscopic vision of a surveillance-heavy world. Scott’s distinctive use of color, particularly green, sets his late-period films apart, offering a refreshing contrast to the typical yellow and brown hues often used to depict Mexico in the 2000s.

Notably, the Netflix version of Man on Fire omits a unique aspect of Scott’s original cut: the dynamic, stylized subtitles for Spanish dialogue, which varied in size and font to emphasize meaning. Watching the film on Netflix requires viewers to choose between enabling subtitles for translation or going without, which could leave non-Spanish speakers struggling to follow key scenes.

Even without those touches, at nearly two-and-a-half-hours Man on Fire is Scott’s longest movie, and most deliberately paced, given his typically frenetic presentation. Unlike a lot of similarly themed thrillers that seem downright eager to feed their characters to the wolves to expedite the violent revenge process, Man on Fire takes its time to develop the relationship between Creasy and Pita. (There is far more of Denzel playing swim coach than you might expect.) Pita isn’t endangered until the 50-minute mark, when Scott unleashes one of his strongest sequences: a jittery shoot-out and kidnapping sequence where the constant cuts, replays, and handheld camera bobs all serve the impressionistic whole, depicting Creasy’s darting professionalism and emotional panic over the situation.

Of course, the running time still leaves an entire feature film’s worth of time for Creasy to storm across Mexico. This is both the material that has made Man on Fire famous and what threatens to turn the movie into gruesome overkill. Perhaps befitting the film sharing a release year with the first Saw movie (and, moreover, a decade of US. entanglements overseas), Creasy’s vengeance and interrogations have a pro-torture bent. He cuts off fingers, sticks C4 up a guy’s ass, shoots tons of guys, and blows up a rave (albeit to the cheers of the crowd who has been evacuated first). His, ah, advanced interrogation techniques basically always work; it’s a fantasy of new American might, embodied by Washington’s fiery insistence.

This makes Man on Fire feel both less suspenseful and less timeless than the other Washington/Scott pictures, which often use their genres to nod at classic movie craftsmanship, and offer a more subtly conflicted version of Washington’s persona. This collaboration is straight out of 2004, in Scott’s style and the story’s substance. But there’s value in that, too. Scott’s movies are known for their visceral immediacy, which means he was able to capture aspects of the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s with equal aplomb. Man on Fire reps a certain kind of lurid post-9/11 righteousness with queasy perfection.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream Man on Fire on Netflix