Equalizer brings integrity to formula
The Wild West needed a marshal. The modern world needs The Equalizer.
A man willing to take on the lost cause of the underdog for nothing but a sense of pride and moral justice, Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) is the kind of hero who doesn’t really exist in real life, but we don’t care.
We want him to exist, and that’s why this old TV franchise that used to star Edward Woodward as a retired spy helping the disenfranchised even the odds against criminal Goliaths still has gas in the tank.
We all want someone like Robert on our side, especially if we happen to be a young prostitute working for the Russian mob, just like the sweet gal (Chloe Grace Moretz) who just wants to sing her own songs but ends up beaten by bad johns and her nogoodnik pimpski.
She knows Robert only from the late-night restaurant where he meticulously rearranges his cutlery, brings his own tea bag and sits down to read a classic novel. In real life, any server would see Robert as the tab from hell, but in this framed tribute to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, he’s the beloved regular who works all day at the local big-box hardware store, but takes care of business at night.
We know Robert is different from the moment we see him take a toothbrush to his running shoes. He is compulsive and obsessive, but that’s why he’s capable of looking at any given situation and figuring out just how long it will take to kill everyone in the room.
Impressively, it’s usually under 60 seconds, which means the bodies start stacking up over the two-hour running time of wellphrased violence.
Moreover, because our hero is OCD with ties to the CIA, he’s awfully tidy when he makes his kills. As a man on a fixed income, he’s also very Spartan with his expenses, which means he’s very resourceful when it comes to tools — sometimes borrowing the odd sledgehammer from the store, only to wipe it clean and put it back on the rack the next day.
Smart, creative protagonists who are both handyman and commando are impossible to resist, so couple that with a desire to do real good in the world and Robert is a saint even before he’s embodied in the flesh of Denzel Washington.
The Oscar-winning actor reteams with Training Day director Antoine Fuqua, but this time around as the good guy, albeit with some rather blurry moral boundaries. Robert kills bad guys repeatedly, and he never gets too upset about it either: His love of order allows him to compartmentalize.
Good people are worth saving. Bad guys get a knife in the throat, a garrote of barbed wire, a drill bit to the brain stem. It works out because Robert is officially dead. He faked his own death to get out of the game. But now he’s back in it, and we get to watch him face off against a formidable enemy in Russian henchman Teddy (Marton Csokas).
It’s all formulaic mob blah-blah, but Fuqua brings in so much visual style, the movie hits a different level of craft. There’s a sense of integrity to the vision, and the execution feels personal and grounded in a way that extends beyond Washington’s predictably riveting performance.
The devil is in the details, they say. And in nailing every little nuance in this one-note symphony, Fuqua crucifies the devil with restraint, spectacle and the brand of kick-ass, no-stinking-badge-needed justice that makes Hollywood cinema so great — no matter how fake it may be.