Denzel is bang-on as a DIY killer (but the plot’s flimsy)
The Equalizer (15) Verdict: Slick, violent thriller
FOR most of its 132 minutes, The Equalizer unfolds as the kind of picture we’ve all seen before, albeit not usually with quite so much nearpornographic relish given to scenes of extreme violence.
But then, in a showdown in a DIY superstore, it abruptly lurches into self-parody, as our hero, Robert McCall (splendidly played, it must be said, by Denzel Washington), begins to kill the baddies using an assortment of handy retail items, depending on which aisle he and they happen to stray into. If he was there any longer he’d have to start Ronsealing them to death.
It is not inappropriate, therefore, that The Equalizer does exactly what it says on the tin. Inspired by the Eighties TV series starring Edward Woodward, it’s a slick, goodlooking bloody thriller . . . heavy on blood but light on thrills.
McCall is a former CIA operative who has faked his own death so that he might live an anonymous life in Boston, working as a DIY superstore security guard by day, and by night reading Hemingway at his favourite table in a neighbourhood diner. It is there that he befriends a young hooker, whose maltreatment at the hands of her Russian pimp sucks McCall back into the life he was trying to escape, and leads him towards a confrontation with a super-villain — you really couldn’t make this up, and yet somebody did — called Pushkin.
As I say, Washington is excellent, managing to dig some emotional depth — maybe with that carbonsteel garden spade from aisle nine — from what is really a one-dimensional part. He is basically Superman, except with his underpants under rather than over his trousers, and his uncanny ability to despatch any number of bad guys in any situation makes for little or no tension.
The pleasure, such as it is, lies in knowing just what happens next: he gets to kill even more nasty men, in ever more ingeniously gory ways.