“He didn’t come for help; he came for permission.”
Swift shot: Some things shouldn’t be tampered with – once again, Hollywood wanted to improve on an old 80’s series, no doubt after the success with The A-Team. But The Equalizer didn’t quite live up to my expectations. With Antoine Fuqua directing, I wanted that insane razor’s edge from Training Day. It just wasn’t there. Much like the McCall character, the pulse was hard to confine or define.
For those unfamiliar with the series, The Equalizer was about a man who used to work in special forces but had to retire due to his age and the plethora of enemies he had gathered in his work. While he officially stopped working for any government, he decided to put his skills to work to make amends for some of the nastier shit he did in the past. Denzel’s modern take on the character doesn’t stray from there. He starts off the film as a seemingly normal, middle-aged man who has become a creature of habit that enjoys reading at a nearby diner in Boston.
In a not so subtle analogy, McCall is compared directly to Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and a big fish is about to make himself known. One of the diner’s regulars is a young, attractive woman, Teri (Chloe Grace Moretz) that McCall has assumed a sort of fatherly role over. He doesn’t judge her for her obvious poor choice of work, but he does gently nudge her to make better choices. Perhaps his influence leads her to stand up for herself, or maybe she just wasn’t built to be a punching bag. Whatever the reason, she gets on the wrong side of the Russian mob and pays dearly for her defiance. McCall can help . . . so, he does.
He confronts the scumbags, who are all covered in gang tattoos that, I am assuming, tell their complete horrible stories. There was much use of the slow-mo and detailed attention to each tattoo on the various scumbags. Since I don’t speak tattoo, I guess it was implied, these were some really terrible human beings. As with the series, if I recall my McCall correctly, he gives the assholes a choice to essentially do the right thing . . . or face his wrath. See if you can guess how that plays out.
McCall attracts the attention of Mother Russia, and they dispatch a real mother fucker, Teddy (Marton Csokas) to clean up the mess. Teddy is the perfect nemesis to McCall, both men are walking lethal weapons, but Teddy doesn’t give anyone a chance to live. Well, except for McCall, whom he conveniently wants to “take alive.” Which started a lot of my problems with The Equalizer. In TV terms, I can let that go, because you need to keep coming up with convenient ways of leaving your star alive. In a film, it just smacks of uber convenience. Plus, there were at least three times Teddy could have attacked McCall but didn’t. Why not?
Minor gripes like that aside, and the many, many times that Fuqua felt the need to just show McCall standing there looking like a badass with random slow-mo and chords in the background, this flick does live up to the hype. The action sequences are well executed, the final battle really did take me back to The A-Team series, when they would use all these tools in creative ways to deal with the bad guys. In The Equalizer, without giving anything away, McCall gets very creative with his surroundings; it’s his briar patch! I also didn’t care for the way the head to head between McCall and Teddy played out in the end. I mean, the whole film is leading up to this moment, and when it happens . . . let’s just say that Fuqua didn’t exactly “nail it.”
If you loved The Equalizer growing up, this won’t ruin it for you – in fact they play a nice final hommage to the series at the end that I thought was a real nice touch. And, the film, despite being primarily an action flick, does draw up some decent characters to get behind. Overall, I was happy about The Equalizer, I just wasn’t thrilled in the literal sense of the word, unlike when I saw Training Day . . . which still quickens my pulse.
