Popular galleries
Based loosely on the 1985-1989 television series, on which Edward Woodward never stuck garden shears in an enemy's throat and never, ever stabbed anyone through the neck with a corkscrew, "The Equalizer" smells like a hit. But I wish it had one completely honest scene, where (for example) someone asks the avenging angel-hero: "Who are you?" And he answers: "I'm Denzel Washington. And Denzel Washington can make even this thing watchable."
More and more with action pictures, there's a test the filmmakers either pass or fail — a moral intelligence exam dealing with the way the movie rewards its customers with the stuff the people have paid to consume, i.e., the violence. Early on in "The Equalizer," directed by Antoine "Training Day" Fuqua from Richard Wenk's script, Washington's Robert McCall murders five Russian goons in a bar, bing, bang, boom, splurch and done. It's a gory sequence but sharply staged and very swift, and it's a scene that passes the test. The context is not complicated; the goons are there to be killed, not worried over. We enjoy the death. It works for us.
Then the film gets dumber and more craven, culminating in a protracted melee set in a Home Depot-like hardware emporium. Like a stoic uncle to little Macaulay Culkin in those eerily sadistic "Home Alone" movies, McCall uses blow torches, hedge clippers, etc., to grind through his opponents. By the end, you feel like kind of an idiot for sitting there watching because the booby-trap slaughter belongs to a movie that does not star Denzel Washington. This one's strictly for those who enjoyed "Man on Fire," the other prominent kid-protection fable, slick and bloodthirsty, in the Washington oeuvre.
McCall lives a lie: A trained killer with a CIA-ish past, he now exists undercover, a quiet if insomniac life, employed by Home Mart, where he is everyone's favorite mentor and colleague. Chloe Grace Moretz is the young prostitute who frequents the same all-night diner favored by McCall. He sits there in the wee hours reading Hemingway's "Old Man and the Sea" for back-story reasons, and because of its handy symbolic weight. McCall is one of those characters the younger characters call "Pops," and he's perpetually underestimated by those who wish him harm.
"Taxi Driver" style, but without that masterwork's disturbing ambiguities, "The Equalizer" establishes the fallen angel to be saved and the avenging angel to do the saving. A Russian sleazeball with underworld connections beats the Moretz character half to death, and McCall retaliates, five dead in the bar. The rest of the movie concerns the Russian sleazeball higher up the sleazeball management ladder brought in to take care of McCall. He's played by Marton Csokas, who as costumed and coiffed here resembles an unnerving cross between Kevin Spacey and Adolf Hitler.
At its best Fuqua's film shows interest in something more than the next neck-snapping flourish. A simple dialogue scene between Washington and Csokas, their first together, becomes a sly showcase of one-upmanship, a little longer and more interesting than you'd expect. I've said it before, but Washington is both movie star and first-rate actor, and he capitalizes on these down-time moments. They're his chance to build a character and reveal some human qualities before getting back to business.
At one point McCall explains to Teri (Moretz) that he's just started reading "Don Quixote," a novel about a "knight in shining armor in a world where knights don't exist anymore." On the nose! Sure they do! For an hour or so "The Equalizer" glides along and works; in the second hour, plus change, it turns into a shameless slaughter contrivance with a flabby sense of pace. I did like one line: "When you pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud too." Washington's the rain; by the end, the movie is the mud.
Twitter @phillipstribune
"The Equalizer" - 2 stars
MPAA rating: R (for strong bloody violence and language throughout, including some sexual references)
Running time: 2:11
Opens: Friday
