Oh man, don’t you just HATE all the corruption and venality in this world? All those crooked, dirty cops? And don’t get me started on the Russian mafia! Don’t you just wanna jam a corkscrew up their jaws? Don’t you wanna power-drill through their heads? Don’t you wanna hang them with barbed wire?
If you took a moment from tuning your crossbow to answer ‘yes’ to all of the above, chances are you’ll still find The Equalizer’s choice to preface its onslaught of Chuck Norris-esque vigilante porn with a Mark Twain quote to be a bit on the pretentious side. Then again, gussied-up trash is the M.O. of this film adaptation of the popular 1980s TV series, which reunites Denzel Washington with his Training Day director Antoine Fuqua, and makes the latter look like Le Samouraï by comparison.
Here, Washington plays Robert McCall, a likeable blue-collar Boston loner who spends his leisure time in a local diner reading classic literature. There he encounters Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz), a stock hooker with a heart of gold, under the control of abusive Russian mobsters. When she’s brutally beaten by one of them, McCall takes it upon himself to enact revenge on the men responsible, which leads him to a facing off with a Russian mob boss (Marton Csokas) and the complying Boston police force, using skills (equalising skills, you might say) from his Special Forces past.
Charges of xenophobia and a dim view of women aside, The Equalizer is mostly just startlingly dull, with the queasy slasher-film killings diluting any potential revenge-narrative satisfactions, and the pervading urine-tinted visual sheen making it boring to look at as well. It goes without saying that Washington carries it effortlessly, but the gravitas he naturally lends just makes the toxicity of the whole package more problematic, at least until it becomes impossible to take seriously during its nutso climax. Bring on the sequel!
1.5/5 stars
The Equalizer opens in cinemas on Thursday September 25.
