The equalizer5/8/2023 ![]() ![]() Soon he's even taking on crooked cops, beating them up and blackmailing them into returning the protection money they've extorted from a restaurant – along with an apology. But like Travis Bickle before him, once McCall uncorks his inner bully-of-bullies, he can't stop him. This confrontation is a great, tense scene, one the movie builds to for 35 minutes. But the slavers refuse, so it's back to the Corkscrew/Shot Glass/Ashtray Plan. Because he has renounced violence, McCall actually tries to buy Elena's freedom first. If anybody has a bullet (corkscrew, shot glass, ashtray) karmically coming their way, it's these jerkazoids. even if you didn't already know from the trailer that he can stroll into a den of armed thugs, read their neck tattoos like a barcode scanner, and predict within a few seconds how long it's going to take him to slay them all, no two in the same way.ĭon't feel bad for them they're Russian sex traffickers who beat Elena - the sad-eyed teenage prostitute (Chloe Grace Moretz) who sometimes talks to McCall at the diner - near to death. When he catches the colleague he's helping to lose weight sneaking some chips, he speaks not a critical word he just gives a reproachful look and says he's looking for "Progress, not perfection." You'd want this guy in your corner. The kids at the big-box hardware store where he works call him "Pops" and use YouTube to fact-check his claim that he sang backup for Gladys Knight. The details of his former life as a spook are wisely left vague: All we know – and we get this from behavior, not exposition – is that he's a meticulous, solitary soul who goes out of his way to be kind and helpful. He's also apparently OCD, continually rearranging the utensils on the table.)ĭeservedly or not, the movie is elevated several echelons by Washington's Father Knows Best (How to Kill Slimeballs) performance. Is he overqualified for The Equalizer? Are you saying that just because this movie would've starred Steven Seagal back when Washington was playing Malcolm X for Spike Lee, but would otherwise have differed little from the version we're watching in 2014? (Washington's character, McCall, even brings his own teabags to the all-night diner where he hangs out reading leatherbound classics when he can't sleep, furtively tossing them in his cup the instant before the waiter pours his hot water. ![]() But Washington is even better at it, and of course he has not one but two Oscar statuettes he can reach for when he needs a makeshift weapon. Liam Neeson has played minor variations on this Sad Jedi role even more times than Washington. (Sidebar: When did the celibacy thing become pervasive in action movies? Is it because of PG-13 creep, or because the median age of our action leads has shot up by 20 years?) The film around it remains a hummable, easy-to-digest entry in a long line of monastic plainclothes superhero flicks about penitent and unknowable widowers. The picture's soundtrack runs more to Eminem and – since we're already talking about dirty little crime pictures buffed and polished and inflated to portentous scale - the same Moby song Michael Mann used to introduce Al Pacino and Robert De Niro's historic tete-a-tete in Heat 19 years ago. Your mileage may vary.įrom its Edward Woodward-starring '80s CBS primetime forebear, The Equalizer has inherited a title and vague premise – retired covert-ops badass uses Murderous Jedi Skills to help the meek – but not, unfortunately, Police drummer Stewart Copeland's New Wave theme music. Like their prior collaboration, it scrapes together two gripping, closely observed acts before lobotomizing itself for an over-the-top final third that tips the needle from "Pleasure" to "Pleasure, Guilty, Shame on You!" I liked the lengthy first act where Washington walks the Earth – well, part of Boston – dispensing inspiration and literary analysis of great novels he's read and dietary advice even better than the (longer) part where he's dispensing justice. But it's a better fit for the surprisingly patient, unsurprisingly violent movie they've made. That's a different Twain quote from the one that appears onscreen at the top of The Equalizer, the Zen vigilante flick reuniting Training Day director and star Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington. But it's kind of slow, and takes a long time." "A man has a quarrel with another man and kills him then that other man's brother kills him then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another then the cousins chip in - and by and by everybody's killed off, and there ain't no more feud. "A feud is this way," Mark Twain wrote in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Denzel Washington stars as a retired intelligence officer in The Equalizer.
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