The fact The Equalizer is an adaptation of a 1980s television series is meaningless to me. My only familiarity with the show is watching Rob Reiner in Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street, piss and moan after a phone call causes him to miss a portion of an episode. That said, it seems a working knowledge of the show would be of little use, that is unless there was more to the series than themes ridiculously ripped from classic literature and a trail of dead bodies left in the wake of a one man wrecking crew as he doles out his own brand of justice in a film that’s not exactly good, not exactly bad, a little too long and violently fun. How’s that for a mixed bag of descriptors?
What’s best about The Equalizer is the fact Denzel Washington still makes movies like this. Denzel is a star big enough his first name alone is a brand unto itself, and yet he still has no problem starring in films such as Unstoppable, 2 Guns and now The Equalizer; action films one could say are below an actor of his stature and yet he’s the number one reason many of us are turning up to see any of them.
Here he stars as Robert McCall, a mysterious loner working at a big box hardware store, but we know walking in McCall has a past that will soon come into play. Various supporting characters are introduced, clearly because they’ll play some sort of role later in the film, providing people for McCall to care about. This includes Johnny Skourtis as an overweight coworker whom McCall is helping lose weight so he can become one of the worst security guards known to man and Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz), a young prostitute for a Russian outfit who eventually serves as the tipping point, sending McCall over the edge and into a state of vengeful retribution.
Outside of a couple of crooked cops extorting local small business owners and an armed robber, McCall’s initial targets are a few Russians that dared put Teri in the hospital. His interaction with these fellas, however, introduces the film’s heavy, Nicolai (Marton Csokas), brought in from Russia to take care of whomever has put a kink in their works in the Boston area. Nicolai soon learns it isn’t a group of people he has to worry about, but a man that appears unstoppable.
McCall’s invincibility, however, is the one thing keeping this film together. It’s always tricky territory when you start debating a filmmaker’s intention, though with this movie I find it hard to believe director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, Olympus Has Fallen) was going for anything too serious and instead reveled in the fact we get to watch Denzel debate how long it will take him to single-handedly kill five armed men in a room and blow up half the Boston harbor, walking away in superhero fashion. As cliched as it may be, it was a rather awesome sight and one of many such instances that had me laughing, not with ridicule, but with enjoyment.
As for Csokas, he’s a bit of a thorn in the movie’s side, though I can’t place all the blame on his shoulders. Screenwriter Richard Wenk (The Expendables 2, The Mechanic) has never shown a knack for dialogue or character and the way he’s written Nicolai is no better. In fact, Csokas hamming it up for the film’s duration is probably much better than had he played it entirely straight, and more to Fuqua’s playful nature with the material, he dresses up one of Nicolai’s goons with a mustache that had me thinking of the animated Hanna-Barbera character Dick Dastardly. I mean, you can’t give a guy a mustache like that and tell me the director is going for serious drama. Fuqua is celebrating excess and asks us to join him.
There’s little to take away from the supporting performances. Moretz is hardly in the film and has a hard time standing toe-to-toe with Denzel when she’s on screen, while Melissa Leo and even Bill Pullman have little to do other than serve an expository scene late in the proceedings. Haley Bennett and David Harbour get the meatiest supporting bits when Csokas isn’t mean-mugging for the audience. Harbour even allows a lone tear to fall at one point during a rather standard scene, turning it into something a little more than the film actually deserves.
I’m not entirely sure I would have had as much fun with The Equalizer had I not seen it with a friend. It’s so ridiculous it’s laughable, and laugh we did. The mere fact it’s called The Equalizer is funny enough as McCall isn’t “equalizing” anything, he’s just straight up killing everyone and he’s using his hands, knives, guns, hammers, barbed wire, drills and whatever else he can find to do it. I enjoyed the hell out of myself while watching it while at the same time realizing I wasn’t exactly watching a good movie as much as I was watching a good, bad movie.
By the film’s end, with the hilarious “Old Man and the Sea” visual metaphor and the Craigslist bit, you’ll be able to look back at The Equalizer and realize Fuqua was having as much ridiculous fun as you should have had watching it.
