The Equalizer
Now playing at Scotiabank
Power-drill to the head, barbed-wire choker, corkscrew to the soft palate? Welcome to Denzel Washington’s first horror movie.
No abandoned cabin, so a dimly lit Rona-type hardware warehouse will have to do. Or an abandoned alleyway. Or a restaurant hallway. Or a garage. Heck, weird deaths happen everywhere.
Washington is Robert McCall, a man with a murky past. That past clearly haunts him, because he can’t sleep at night. He spends his nights reading at 24-hour diners. He’s currently on book 91 of his late wife’s favourite 100 classics, suggesting that McCall is smarter than your average dormant vigilante.
One night he meets Alina (Chloe Grace Moretz), a young hooker working for the Russians. “We both know what I am,” Alina says. “You can be anything you want to be,” assures McCall, in a trite conversation about life and literature made watchable by Moretz’s affecting performance.
The girl ends up beaten within an inch of her life and in the ICU. Alina’s beating is the impetus McCall needs to come out of retirement and settle scores on behalf of the downtrodden. Unfortunately the film goes south precisely when the relationship between man and girl is taken out of the picture.
A revenge mission with the entire East Coast Russian mafia ensues, starting with scene wherein McCall is outnumbered in a Clue-style murder scenario: will it be death at the hands of the guy with the knife, the gun, or the paperweight? None of the above! McCall despatches them all — remember that corkscrew? — each in particularly gruesome fashion. Good thing Russians are really slow on the trigger.
Wait, you didn’t see it? Each killing will be repeated again, close-up, in flashback.
The violence has nothing to anchor itself to, so viewers are left to float from one brutal encounter to the next. Director Antoine Fuqua is clearly trying to reproduce the success of Training Day, which was thrilling specifically because of the relationship between seasoned cop and rookie.
There is no such emotional investment here. With seemingly no family or friends to answer to, McCall has no motivation to stay straight. It’s troubling, thematically: in a brief conversation between McCall and White House insider/former friend Susan (Melissa Leo) reassures McCall that the part of him that his wife loved is still there. We don’t see any of it.
McCall himself says that the violence gives him “peace.” He’s not good enough to be a Good Samaritan; we can’t root for him, because McCall himself is a borderline psychopath. In fact, there isn’t much separating him from his ultimate Russian nemesis, “Teddy” (Martin Csokas), a cold, unflinching killer with a Hitler hairdo.
Even as a slice of ’80s pulp (it’s based on the TV show from that era) The Equalizer disappoints, and is a blatant waste of Washington’s talents. Indeed Liam Neeson, that other elder action hero, is given more breadth than Washington, reduced here to icy stares and lip-twitching.
