Antoine Fuqua | 127 mins | streaming (HD) | 2.35:1 | USA / English, Russian & Spanish | 15 / R
Back in the ’80s, everyone’s favourite actor whose name is also the punchline to a joke (“what do you call a man with three planks on his head?”), Edward Woodward, starred in a US TV drama about a former secret agent who uses those skills to exact vigilante justice for innocents who can’t help themselves. I’ve never seen it, but I guess it was popular back in the day because, 25 years after it ended, it was rebooted on the big screen. Or maybe they’ve just run out of popular stuff and are now rebooting anything and everything they can get their hands on. Either way, it’s a decent enough IP to fashion into a contemporary action-thriller, and indeed director Antoine Fuqua has made a decent-enough contemporary action-thriller.
In this iteration, Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) is, by day, a mild-mannered member of staff at whatever the US equivalent of B&Q is; but by night, memories of his former life as some kind of special agent keep him awake, so he hangs out at a diner where he regularly bumps into working girl Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz). After she’s hospitalised by a client, McCall feels he can’t sit on the sidelines anymore, and applies his Very Special Skills to her pimps — just to, you know, equalise things. Unfortunately, turns out those pimps were Russian gangsters, and now McCall has a bigger fight on his hands…
The Equalizer is a decently-made, well-performed, pretty entertaining action-thriller for fans of the genre. There’s nothing fundamental to complain about if you take it for what it is, and anyone who enjoys inventive deaths will be tickled by some sequences. Otherwise, it lacks originality, remixing familiar tropes and plot points into a passably-new shape.
Viewers who as a rule don’t enjoy this kind of movie will find nothing remarkable. Equally, fans of the genre will be perfectly entertained for a couple of hours.
