Review: The Equalizer

by Trevor Kirkendall

★

“The Equalizer” is yet another example of how Hollywood producers have either lost their creative mentality or just don’t care about finding original stories anymore. They’re out there, though. Studios continue to buy original concepts from writers, many of them first-time screenwriters. But where are these movies? The indie houses crank them out all the time, but they never make it to the big theaters.

I have another theory though: Hollywood finds it easy to regurgitate the same formula over and over again because they know you’re going to see it. The think we – as an audience/consumer – are stupid. Everyone always says they’re sick and tired of sequels, remakes, and reboots and that we demand originality. But which ones do the best at the box office? “Godzilla” or “Pacific Rim?” Both are the same movie, just one has a franchise title on it. Same rules apply here with “The Equalizer.” Would anyone see this movie if it didn’t have the name of widely successful TV series from the 80s? Probably not.

But I digress. “The Equalizer” stars Denzel Washington as Robert McCall, a heavy lifter at the local Home Mart, a Home Depot/Lowes type of store. No one really knows what he did before he began his job at Home Mart. Every day, McCall comes to work, eats his healthy lunch, goes home, reads, and never sleeps. Since he can never sleep, he spends many nights drinking tea at a local diner near his home.

At the diner, he befriends a young escort named Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz). She hates her job, but knows no other life. Turns out, she’s been brought to the United States from her Russian home and forced into this life. When her handlers brutally beat her within an inch of her life for insubordination, McCall decides enough is enough and murders her Russian bosses in their office. That’s enough for the big boss in Russia to send someone to clean up the mess, a ruthless one-dimensional villain named Teddy (Marton Csokas).

This is a big screen television adaptation in name only. Other than calling the main character Robert McCall, and a little homage to the series right before the closing credits, there is nothing about this film that remotely resembles the original series. Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the story doesn’t hold up well at all. I can look the other way on the whole “adapted-from-a-television-series” thing, but a half-assed, cliché littered screenplay cannot be overlooked.

I’m sure the script in its original form was probably okay, until some Hollywood executive got his hands all over it and decided to change the main character’s name to Robert McCall and slap “The Equalizer” brand name all over it. Rather than change things around and throw an old 80s show title on the poster, they should have spent more time on the story itself because this is not good. The whole plot point the sets this story in motion is one of the most far-fetched examples of an inciting incident to come across the silver screen all year. Not to mention, it takes almost an entire half hour to reach. By that time, I assume most people will have already tuned out much of what’s already happened. But if they didn’t call it “The Equalizer” would anyone go see it? Nope.

Director Antoine Fuqua continues to prove himself as an inept storyteller. Aside from “Training Day,” which is mediocre at best, Fuqua only concerns himself with staging action sequences and concocting moments of cheap thrills. For “The Equalizer,” Fuqua delivers nothing new. In fact, he pulls out all the tricks in the book to make this film full of every crime film cliché we’ve seen since the dawn of the genre. He directs his focus to setting up brutally violent sequences rather than finding things for the audience to empathize with and gain some form of a rooting interest. Not that the script from Richard Wenk (“The Expendables 2”) had much there to begin with. Fuqua’s cast receives no favors either.

Denzel is Denzel, playing the same action hero/crime fighter he’s played in almost all his movies. I do like him as an actor for the most part, but his choice of films lately has me questioning if he really is as good as we make him out to be. But every time I start to feel this way, he ends up doing something fantastic – like “Flight” – and all is forgiven. At least, until his next atrocity. The only person worth mentioning in this film is Mortez who continues to show she is much more proficient in her ability than her age would indicate. And yet, she’s greatly misused here, taking up only a small amount of screen time despite being the catalyst for the entire story. I’m not saying she’s memorizing in this role by any stretch, but at least she does bring something new in this performance we don’t normally see from her.

For a film about brutal revenge killings, I suppose “The Equalizer” could be considered decent. But fans of the 80s television series will be supremely disappointed when they see someone masquerading around as Robert McCall not acting like the Robert McCall they all know and love. This is a cheap and blatant attempt by a Hollywood studio to capitalize on its own history again by slapping the name of a once successful series and trying to market it as something new and fresh. We shouldn’t be so easily fooled by this, but I have a feeling this film will do well and will no doubt produce some kind of sequel, or worse, a long running franchise. That’s just what we need: more vapid and uninspired garbage from studios only interested in repackaging the same exact thing you’ve seen over and over and over for the last decade or two.