Movie Review: The Equalizer

Denzel Washington is currently undergoing the same late-career transformation that Liam Nesson did five years ago with the release of Taken. For the first two decades of his career, Washington split his time between dramatic roles and story-oriented crime dramas. Ever since The Book of Eli was released in 2010, Washington has turned into a certified badass killing machine. His latest film, The Equalizer, is the most unapologetically violent film Washington has ever starred in, and will undoubtedly complete his transition from serious dramatic actor to the next AARP action star.  

Washington plays Robert McCall, a former Special Forces agent who now works at a Boston hardware store. McAll is forced back into action once the teenage prostitute he's befriended (Chloe Grace Moretz) at a local diner is badly beaten by her pimp. McCall proceeds to kill her pimp- who happens to be a member of the Russian mafia. Soon after, a crazed mob enforcer (Marton Csokas) is hot on his trail and, all hell breaks loose as McCall is forced back into a world he thought he had permanently abandoned. 

For whatever reason, The Equalizer makes the awkward choice to focus less on Washington crushing skulls and more time on a storyline that just isn't all that interesting. The early scenes between Washington and Moretz work, but once the story switches to focus on the Russian mob, the film falls flat on its face. Every single scene with the Russian mobsters and the corrupt Boston police officers that work for him are an absolute snooze to sit through. Csonaks takes his role as Russian mob nutjob Teddy far too seriously and, comes off far more corny than menacing while the corrupt cops are ripped straight from the stock character 101 handbook. The scenes with McCall aren't much better. The non-fight scenes with McCall are split between him mentoring a colleague at the hardware store who wants to a security guard (Johnny Skourtis), silent, introspective shots of him pondering what his dead wife would think about his return to the killing business, and the occasional information shakedown of a corrupt cop. Washington gives a spirited performance as always, but even a masterful actor like him can't elevate just how empty these sequences are.

Worst of all, all this time spent to trying to (unsuccessfully) develop these characters keeps the amount of bloody action sequences this genre of movie is built around to a minimum. B-grade vigilante movies like The Equalizer are not the type of action films where you try to tell a meaningful, detailed story. The sole reason for films like The Equalizer to exist is to have a brainless, blood-soaked good time at the movies. The attempt to flesh-out these characters out and overly-serious approach to the story takes away from the fun this genre typically offers up. Brutal revenge films simply should not the stone-serious tone and painfully slow pace that The Equalizer has.

The handful of action scenes that are present here give The Equalizer just enough adrenaline to get by. These scenes are mostly all too brief, but god damn do they work. It's almost pathetic at the amount of depraved joy I got watching Washington tear through hordes of bad guys in the most gruesome ways possible in such a short amount of time. The only action sequence that lasts more than a couple of minutes is the hardware store-set finale, which is worth the price of admission alone. Director Antoinie Fuqua (Olympus Has Fallen, Training Day) ramps up the tension and body count in the nearly 20-minute scene that caps off the film on the highest note possible. Its a shame that The Equalizer waited so long to hit its stride because if there was more sequences like this, it would been an elite action flick. There's a great revenge film buried somewhere in The Equalizer, but with its choice to focus more on a lifeless storyline than the gripping action scenes, it's nothing more than a decent early-fall throwaway action/thriller.

3/5 Stars