The equalizer
The Equalizer
Eighties television was a heyday for people needing help out of a tight corner. If Magnum P.I. wouldn’t take your case and neither Simon nor Simon was returning your calls, and if you couldn’t find the A-Team — well, there was always Robert McCall, a.k.a. The Equalizer. Through 88 episodes, from the Challenger disaster to the fall of the Berlin Wall, he faced down the crème de la crime of New York City.
But three decades on and with a move to Boston, do we still need him? Particularly now that we’ve got Liam Neeson? Writer Richard Wenk ( The Expendables 2) and director Antoine Fuqua ( Training Day, Olympus Has Fallen) would like us to believe so, but the case they mount is largely circumstantial, and ultimately unconvincing.
The new Robert McCall is played by Denzel Washington, master of moral disguise. Is he a good guy ( Unstoppable) or a bad guy ( American Gangster) or just a good guy in a bad situation ( John Q)? The Equalizer definitely paints him in red, white and blue. By day, he’s the life of the party at the hardware superstore where he works; by night, this insomniac haunts a diner right out of an Edward Hopper painting, where he flirts harmlessly with a young Russian (Chloë Grace Moretz), reads great literature and suggests obsessive-compulsive disorder, a diagnosis that ultimately goes nowhere.
The Russian girl goes somewhere, however; the hospital, and McCall doesn’t like how she got there. So he puts down The Old Man and the Sea and starts working his way up the Russian mafia’s chain of command, leaving bodies piled in his wake like so much cordwood.
You can tell how important each bad guy is by the raspiness and nefariousness of his accent. My
You can tell how important each bad guy is by the raspiness of his accent
favourite is probably Teddy (Marton Csokas, a New Zealander), a man with a professional-looking Chechen War headshot, and so heavily tattooed that even with his shirt off he appears fully dressed. Fuqua gives us a literally over-the-top shot of him, the better to appreciate the body art.
It’s one of the nicer things to look at in a movie that celebrates its violence, even as its hero mopishly mulls over unspecified things he’s done in the past. (Melissa Leo and Bill Pullman show up as friends from said former life.) McCall has more than a touch of MacGyver about him, able to cook up a gunshot-wound remedy out of boiled honey, and turn just about anything else into an instrument of blunt trauma.
Trying to broaden the plot a little and pad out the film’s 132-minute running time leads to some additional characters. David Harbour shows up as Frank Masters, a cop so bent he can see behind him without turning his head. And Johnny Skourtis plays Ralph, who wants to become a security guard; also, his mom is being shaken down by a protection racket.
You can almost hear the movie pleading to be the first in a franchise, which is all any action flick seems to want these days. Sure, it’s grimly satisfying to watch McCall in the final, DIY showdown. (Cleanup in aisle 7. And 12. And 19 through 25 ...) And Fuqua may have set a record in this film for the size of an explosion that someone blithely walks away from without looking back or even flinching. But I’m not sure we need to see any more of the same. Let’s just take this one and call it even.
The Equalizer opens wide Sept. 26.