The Equalizer

2014 action movie

Rating: 9/20

Plot: A mysterious guy who likes to read finds himself engaging in some of the violent activities of his past after a prostitute he's befriended finds herself in a little trouble.

Here's a case where the preview of a sequel to a movie persuaded me to check out the original. Denzel Washington, who isn't bad here at all despite all the criticisms I'm about to pile on this movie, is always a presence, and the sequel's preview intrigued me.

Nearly every cliched second of this ultra-violent and weirdly ultra-serious mess bored me. When your favorite scene in an action movie like this is one where Washington's character visits an old FBI buddy and she, her husband, and Denzel eat soup and stare at each other awkwardly, the action movie probably has a problem on its bloody hands. A Mark Twain quote attempts to class this up right away. Following that, it's a bloody romp through fields of cliches, making the whole thing lazily predictable. The writers needed some easy characterization for Washington's character, and they handled that as lazily as possible by giving him a dead wife and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder so there's a reason for him to be mysteriously mopey and for the director to include scenes where he toothbrushes his New Balance sneakers for some close-up product placement. They also make him a consumer of great literature, lines about books like The Old Man and the Sea just oozing with meaning and too-obvious symbolism. They also give him a lot of dialogue with his prostitute friend and his chubby co-worker where he gets to be super inspirational. It's only when Denzel claims that he was a Pip and shows off some dancing moves for no real reason at all that he breaks free from the cliches a bit.

The villains are equally cliched. They're these vaguely familiar and heavily-tattooed baddies, all part of some sketchily-realized crime syndicate that engage in the sorts of activities that crime syndicates in Hollywood movies generally engage in. One dude has some bitchin' boots with skulls on them. Add in that chubby co-worker who you just assume is going to get his chance to shine at some point in a big action climax and that prostitute with the heart of gold, and you've got yourself a collective of characters who seem like they've been transplanted from a nearly identical action movie.

Speaking of action, there's a lot of it here. Denzel moves great here, and there's not a moment that I didn't buy that character. But that was almost a fault as there's exactly one fight in this entire movie where the character is in any kind of peril at all. Deaths in this are especially gruesome even when they don't need to be. These bad guys are corkscrewed in the gullet, drilled through the backs of skulls, hanged with barbed wire, sickled through the neck, and glassed in the face as Washington charges toward his finish line like a one-man wrecking crew. Slow-motion effects are overused with bad guys getting shot up in slow-motion falling sprinkler water and things explode in slow-motion puffs of fire.

The score for this is one of the most obnoxiously bland scores I've ever heard.

Will I still see the sequel to this? Probably. I don't have a lot going on in my life right now.