When we first encounter Denzel Washington in the new action vehicle The Equalizer, he’s living an awfully un-Denzel-like life. He works in a home-repair big-box store, where he spends his lunch breaks advising a coworker on how to eat healthy and lose weight. He takes the bus to work, he lives alone in a modest Boston walkup, and in his downtime, he reads masterpieces (The Old Man and the Sea, The Invisible Man) in a quiet diner.
All of these details point to a more contemplative drama about a widowed loner, which The Equalizer is very much not. This surprising richness of character, which carries the first 20 pages or so of Richard Wenk’s lopsided screenplay, is completely abandoned after the first onscreen bloodbath; the rest is a protracted barrage of meretricious and tawdry set pieces, dispensing with both its brain and heart.
As we soon discover, there’s good reason Washington’s Bob McCall has disappeared into a life of workaday privacy: He’s a former Special Forces officer who left the CIA for the quiet pleasures of anonymity, a move that included his staged funeral. He’s drawn back into the killing biz when he witnesses the abuse of a young prostitute (Chloe Grace Moretz) he befriends in the diner; this leads to a run-in with the Russian criminal underground, which metastasizes over the course of the movie. McCall’s chief nemesis is Teddy (Martin Csokas), a well-spoken sociopath with a bad comb-over and tattoos of devils stretching across his chest.
Alas, once you start slaughtering people for the good of humanity, it’s hard to stop, and director Antoine Fuqua permits McCall to bust local cops and robbers as well, as long as they’re sufficiently demonized first; we wouldn’t want any of that messy ethical confusion that defines many modern-day antiheroes. No, McCall is more of a straightforward avenging angel, Dirty Harry only dirtier. His every calculated attack plays crudely to the audience’s insatiable bloodlust, all of it carefully couched in moral authority. Forget about McCall’s tortured past, the history of violence that led to his traumatic exile from the CIA: Killing is awesome!
I don’t know what’s worse, the movie’s vacuous celebration of all things murderous or its proud lack of originality. Everybody in the movie resembles a laughably stereotypical stock character from an unproduced USA Network pilot. And, in fact, The Equalizer is based on a cult television series of the same name, which aired on CBS in the late ’80s. Ho hum. The movie ends essentially where the series begins, leaving a door the size of a rancid sinkhole wide open for a franchise.
The saddest part about The Equalizer is that it provides another example of wasted employment for Washington, an actor renowned for his masterful work on the stage and screen, but who more often than not is reduced to playing indestructible superheroes in forgettable blockbusters. His charisma at least brought some humor and charm to 2013’s 2 Guns; here, his actor’s toolbox is limited to a deceptive smile followed by a dead stare, his eyes colder than a Minnesota winter. It’s the way Fuqua telegraphs the crude killing to come, so that we, like Pavlov’s dogs, can begin to salivate with the anticipation of a sharp object puncturing an evildoer’s skin.
It’s one thing for Steven Seagal to still accept roles like this, or for most of the Expendables ensemble, for that matter. Washington is still too relevant to degrade his reputation with this sort of swill.
THE EQUALIZER. Director: Antoine Fuqua; Cast: Denzel Washington, Martin Csokas, Chloe Grace Moretz, David Harbour, Johnny Skourtis, Melissa Leo, Bill Pullman; Distributor: Columbia; Rating: R; Opens: Today at most area theaters