This review was written by our new recruit Saul, who is going to start writing for us every so often. - Jack
In recent years, Denzel Washington has established and slowly disintegrated his status as a badass action star in films like Man on Fire. And with director Antoine Fuqua, the pair have attempted to recapture the magic of the Academy Award-winning Training Day. Spoiler alert, they haven't. What they have done is create a solid, slow-paced action-thriller that gets progressively more random and inevitably settles down in mediocrity.
The Equaliser follows Robert McCall, a quiet, private and apparently ex-military middle-aged man working in a hardware warehouse store. Much of the first half of the film is spent following him through his daily routines, his work and his friendships there (specifically Ralphie, who Robert is helping to become a security guard), and a local coffee shop where he visits nightly to read and talk to under-age prostitute Teri (Moretz). McCall loves to help people out, and this eventually evolves from helping train Ralphie and encouraging Teri, to murdering her pimp and taking on an international criminal organisation.
The way in which The Equaliser implodes is indicative of a lack of concrete and original ideas, as though several pages of the script went missing and the director attempted to improvise in the missing parts. There is obvious vision for how the beginning will work, and how he becomes a hero for hire, but as the Second Act looms and the plot thickens, ridiculousness seeps in to worrying degrees, slowly consuming the film from the inside out, leading into an ending nearly fully detached from the first half. The positives of this film are, without a doubt, the establishment of McCall and his primary nemesis, Teddy/Nikolai, played by Marton Csoskas. Most of this is accomplished solidly without being too overt, there's little-to-no explicit mention of McCall's military service in the first half, but it's also glaringly obvious, mostly through Washington's commendable characterisation. And Russian enforcer Teddy is introduced as an enigmatic, intelligent, cold and dominant figure in the wake of the first action sequence, and during the second act explodes into violent acts that are not unlike Ryan Gosling's Driver character from Drive, cutting a fearsome path through his early scenes.
However, the film falls apart in so many ways that it beggars belief. Characters appear and disappear with little-to-no explanation or introduction, Chloe Grace Moretz's Teri literally vanishes after the first action scene, rendering any and all setup for her to be the Jodie Foster to McCall's Travis Bickle instantly null and void. Whatever good that began with McCall and Teddy's characters soon evolves into a pissing contest for emotionlessness, which even the movie explicitly mentions at one point. Character motivations and relations feel random and convenient, McCall is both invincible and omnipotent, and aside from brief moments in the climax, there is literally zero threat to McCall throughout the film. He nonchalantly dispatches henchmen with such amusing ease that rarely is it even shown onscreen for fear of boring the audience. And it's almost painfully nostalgic how the primary goons are tattoo-covered, muscly Russians with skull fetishes, perhaps indicative of a re-emerging trend in action films.. And on the technical side, the score and direction are so painfully "middle-of-the-road 2000's action" that, save for one GORGEOUS dissolve emphasising Teddy's dominance over the city of Boston, they hardly deserve a mention.
All in all, this is the cinematic equivalent of slowly watching a ball of yarn roll around the floor and untangle itself, eventually revealing itself as an assemblage of mediocrity, with brief, seemingly accidental moments of brilliance and beauty. Unfortunately, ridiculousness, and lack of emotion and motivation ruin a movie that had the potential to be much more than a good film gone bad. Wait for the DVD release.
