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.

Review: Olympus Has Fallen

by Trevor Kirkendall

★★

The White House is under siege in “Olympus Has Fallen” and the fate of the world is on the shoulders of one very badass dude. And no, it’s not Jack Bauer. “Olympus Has Fallen” is the first of two movies we’ll see this year that feature the White House falling to the hands of enemy combatants (see also “White House Down” later this summer).

Gerard Butler plays Mike Banning, a member of the Secret Service who was once President Ben Asher’s (Aaron Eckhart) head bodyguard. He was relieved of the post, or maybe he quit – the film never does explain this very well, after an accident leads to the death of Asher’s wife (Ashley Judd). He now rides a desk at a different government agency.

One regular evening in Washington, the President is welcoming the South Korean Prime Minster when a large-scale attack is launched on the White House. The attack is led by the sinister Kang (Rick Yune) a former North Korean citizen now working for the South Korean government who has apparently been planning this attack most of his life.

With the White House under enemy fire, Banning picks up a gun and walks right in through the front door, somehow managing to miss every bullet being fired across the lawn. Everyone else dies, except him. In the secured underground bunker, Kang is holding the President hostage, along with the Vice President (Phil Austin), the Secretary of Defense (Melissa Leo) and other White House workers.

One by one, the highly trained Banning begins picking off members of Kang’s army while taunting Kang himself over wireless communication devices, a la Bruce Willis in the original “Die Hard.” He receives his instruction from the Speaker of the House (Morgan Freeman), who is acting as president, the Secret Service Director (Angela Basset) and the Army Chief of Staff (Robert Forster).

As long as the guns are blazing, “Olympus” is not a painful bore, but is rather enjoyable. Director Antoine Fuqua has already proven himself competent action director. His 2001 film “Training Day” was one of the better police thrillers of the previous decade. He continues to show he has the ability to capture high-octane moments on film, and create tension throughout these sequences.

 His downfall here lies in the screenplay, and that is not his fault. Written by first-timers Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt, “Olympus” suffers from rehashed and overused plot devices. Their screenplay is filled with minor subplots that do nothing to advance the story. They are in place to try and create empathy toward our protagonists. The problem is they do not work; they only drag the film along in order for it to clock in right at two hours.

Empathy for Mike Banning never really catches. He’s supposed to be set up as a typical man living in the big city in 2013. He’s obsessed with his job, too obsessed to even notice his wife (Radha Mitchell). President Asher is the same way, although he is president so he needs to be obsessed. That’s the problem with writing presidents in film; you never can truly empathize with him. There are only five men in this world who probably can.

The villains have their own sets of demands, of course, but they don’t seem to justify storming into the White House or killing random innocent civilians either. Their demands are predictable, and don’t even think about trying to take the White House back from them because they already know exactly what the American military will be planning, and they have planned for this. They do have an endgame, too, and its laughable. It revolves around a classified government program. So classified that Gerard Butler doesn’t even know what it is, but not so secret that Korean terrorists found out about it and know exactly what they need to do in order to access it. Hans Gruber and motley crew were more sinister than these guys.

The biggest victim of this botched screenplay is the dialogue. Anytime a character throws his or her head back looking toward the heavens, closes his or her eyes, clenches his or her fists while pumping them into the air and letting out a sorrowful “NO!!” at the top of his or her lungs while the orchestra plays a sappy arrangement, I have to question the writer’s sanity in choosing such overused trash. And I have to feel bad for the actor or actress who has to stand there on set and film that scene over and over again. In this case, the victim was Aaron Eckhart. I’m sorry, Aaron Eckhart.

As long as no one is talking and everyone is just shooting at one another, “Olympus Has Fallen” does its job of being adrenaline pumping action flick. But the lack of substance found in this screenplay really makes the film suffer. And it really does suffer! Since it’s a first time screenplay, I think we can chalk up the issues to that. Not everyone can knock it out of the park on their first step up to the plate.