Man on Fire

I loved the movie Man on Fire starring Denzel Washington and Dakota Fanning. It spurred me to buy and read the book by AJ Quinnell. I thought the movie was great but that the book was 10-times better (a great summer read by the way). That helps explain why I was so curious when I saw that there was an earlier (1987) version of the movie.

I happened to see that the 1987 version of Man on Fire was on cable so I tuned in to watch. Let me just say that the movie was awful. You would think that a movie that starred Scott Glenn and Joe Pesci and featured Jonathan Pryce and Danny Aiello couldn't be that bad - but you would be wrong. The movie was awful, awful, awful. It was so bad that film students should be made to watch this version to see how a director can ruin a great book by trying to be too artsy and writing a convoluted screenplay instead of just using the plot from the book.

A couple of interesting things that I did not know are 1) AJ Quinnell is the pen name for Philip Nicholson (who died in 2005), 2) the Marcus Creasy character was in a series of books (kind of like a Travis McGee character - whereas I thought the Man on Fire book was a one-time deal for the character) and 3) AJ Quinnell (Nicholson) had the same agent as JK Rowling.

Now that I know that there are other Creasy novels - I'm going to have to go out and get a couple. I'll probably start with The Blue Ring or Message From Hell (or whatever Quinnell book is easiest to find).