directed by Antoine Fuqua
written by Richard Wenk
After watching the first trailer for Antoine Fuqua's remake of the 1980s television show The Equalizer, which starred Edward Woodward, I found myself quite keen on seeing it. I was mainly interested in seeing Denzel Washington kick ass once again. While I have long been a fan of Washington's performances in general, it is especially gratifying to me when he plays a bad-ass, like the one he first portrayed in 2004's Man on Fire, and the others he played in films like The Book of Eli and Safe House.
Robert McCall (Washington) leads a quiet life as an employee at a Home Mart hardware store in Boston, Massachusetts. He is well-liked by his co-workers and lives comfortably, if somewhat simply. He has trouble sleeping at night, though, at spends the wee hours of the morning reading books at a diner that is open 24 hours, where befriends child prostitute Teri (Chloe Grace Moretz), whom he tells can change her world when she is disconsolate about her lot in life. At one point, Teri, whose real name is Alina, tries to fight back when an abusive customer hits her, and ends up incurring the ire of her pimp, Slavi (David Meunier), who then beats her within an inch of her life to make an example of her to the other girls. After visiting her in the hospital, McCall then displays an extraordinary set of skills that he picked up from his past life as a black ops operative, as he not only punishes Slavi but takes down all of his body guards in the span of half a minute. Unfortunately, it turns out that Slavi is the representative of someone much bigger, a Russian crimelord named Pushkin (Vladimir Kulich), who dispatches his brutal problem solver nicknamed Teddy (Marton Csokas), who, together with a crew of corrupt Boston cops on Pushkin's payroll, may prove too much for even the highly resourceful McCall to handle. Or maybe not.
I feel this was a movie that would have benefited from a much more muted marketing campaign than the one that made its main fighting sequence the centerpiece of the trailer. The narrative seemed, to me anyway, structured so that McCall's lethal skills are supposed to come to the viewer as a complete surprise, but thanks to the trailer with that magnificent fighting scene, it becomes precisely what the viewer looking for action is looking forward to, which is not a good thing because as it turns out, it's all downhill after that.
To be fair, the fight choreography (or the little of it that can be seen) is exceptional, and just as he did in The Book of Eli and Safe House, Washington shows outstanding onscreen fighting skills to complement his nigh-legendary acting talent. The problem is that, after the first fight, which was expertly staged with its judicious use of slow motion and close-ups to "show" the audience how McCall scans his environment just before walking into an explosive situation, followed by some truly hard-hitting fighting moves, every other fight scene that comes afterwards is spoiled by overly dark lighting or too-quick editing. The idea, I suppose, is to show off McCall's cunning over and above his martial arts skills, but truth be told, I felt the movie would have benefited from more Taken or Bourne style fighting sequences than just the one. Instead, for the climax, the filmmakers provided a somewhat ludicrous finale set in the hardware store, which felt like a more brutal version of scenes from another 1980s television show I grew up with, MacGyver.
(spoilers)
It also annoyed me no end that the script went to some lengths to establish Csokas' character Teddy as a truly fearsome villain, narrating his background as a Russian Secret Service agent and showing in one scene just how brutal he could be, and then completely backed out of having him and McCall slug it out at the end. The script clearly called for a "boss battle" between the two, but ultimately McCall's ultimate slugfest was with a decidedly generic bald Russian goon, with Teddy's fate being decided by something other than fists. It was bad enough that the writing felt utterly by the numbers, and even worse that the filmmakers couldn't even be bothered to deliver on one of the few decent payoffs the script clearly teased.
(end spoilers)
As an action film, the movie often feels rote, with even some of the more striking storytelling devices like the aforementioned slow motion environment scanning having been cribbed from other movies like Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, but the somewhat earnest efforts of Washington and many members of the supporting cast, particularly Moretz, who trades in her Hit Girl tights for a hooker's miniskirt and push-up bra here, save the film from direct-to-video territory, but only just. Richard Wenk's script isn't much to write home about at all, but Washington makes it work, even as he retreads the impossibly wholesome/unflappable characters from films like the aforementioned Eli and the late Tony Scott's Unstoppable to imbue McCall with a nobility that seems somewhat incongruous with the brutality he displays in killing people.
The film's box-office success has ensured that a sequel will eventually hit movie theaters, and next time I honestly hope the filmmakers fix at least some of this film's more glaring flaws. I wasn't really expecting to be quite as disappointed in this film as I was, especially considering my fondness for most of films starring Denzel Washington that I have watched, but not even my predisposition towards liking Washington's movies could overcome this film's somewhat cookie cutter script, poor pacing, and even worse editing.
One final gripe I had was the complete absence of Stewart Copeland's old instrumental theme for the TV show on which it was based. Even a little homage would have been nice.
5.5/10
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