This is the sort of movie where every other character, excepting McCall and Teddy, is basically an idiot, unable to make sense of what’s going on around them, and making terrible decisions throughout. “The Equalizer” strives for respectability, comparing its main man to “The Old Man and the Sea” or “Don Quixote,” and the action sequences are bloody and bruising, even if Washington (now approaching his 60th birthday) doesn’t move quite as quickly as he once did.īut it feels like a product of the ’80s, in terms of its ultraviolence and brutishness. If that sounds pretty ridiculous, it’s because it is. ![]() Turns out those guys were pretty big wheels in the Russian mob, though, and soon Teddy (Marton Csokas), a forgettable villain, is dispatched to Boston to sort out just who has been killing all these gangsters. McCall offers her pimp his life savings after she receives a vicious beating, and when he’s laughed out the door, something snaps, and his past bubbles to the surface in a blistering fury of bloodshed and mayhem. It’s there that he befriends Teri (Chloe Grace Moretz), a young prostitute with aspirations of performing. He leads a solitary life that often finds him spending lonely nights in a diner, reading great works of literature. It’s made clear that this is a second career for him, and he’s kind and helpful to his co-workers, though he never lets on about what he used to do. ![]() When we meet him, McCall is working at a Boston home supply store, not unlike Home Depot. The movie is savagely graphic, earning its R rating, as McCall wades through an army of Russian mobsters, mowing them down with corkscrews, shot glasses and barbed wire. Washington’s character, Robert McCall, doesn’t use a gun (neither did MacGyver, remember?), and he’s able to build killing contraptions out of standard household materials. But it’s possible “The Equalizer” owes its greatest debt to “Death Wish,” the controversial 1974 Charles Bronson celebration of vigilantism that was far more relevant then than “The Equalizer” is today, though the new movie is far more violent than all those other projects put together. In keeping with the TV-shows-from-a-bygone-era theme, there’s also plenty of “MacGyver” in the mix. ![]() Yes, the new Denzel Washington action-thriller “The Equalizer” is based on the television series from the 1980s, which starred Edward Woodward as a former special operations soldier trying to atone for his past deeds by righting wrongs, free of charge.īut the new movie - which re-teams Washington with director Antoine Fuqua, who helmed “Training Day,” the film that earned the actor his Best Actor Oscar - has its roots in other projects, too.
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