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The Equalizer
| Released |
26 September 2014 |
| Director |
Antoine Fuqua |
Starring
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Denzel Washington, Chloe Grace Moretz, Melissa Leo, Bill Pullman, Marton Csokas |
| Writer(s) |
Richard Wenk |
Producer(s)
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Todd Black, Jason Blumenthal, Denzel Washington, Alex Siskin, Steve Tisch, Mace Neufeld, Tony Eldridge, Michael Sloan |
| Origin |
United States |
| Running Time |
131 minutes |
| Genre |
Action, crime, thriller |
| Rating |
16 |
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Training Wheels.
It’s hard to imagine that expectations were all that high for an adaptation of some forgotten ‘80s TV show that nobody on this side of the Atlantic even watched the first time around, but fortunately The Equalizer manages to fall gloriously short of even these abysmally low standards.
It almost veers into so-bad-it’s-good cult film territory, but manages to side-step even this dubious achievement by being relentlessly un-engaging throughout.
The film is ostensibly a revenge-driven action film, but for most of the film the action is conspicuously absent, as is the tension that said absence of action must be intended to create. In fact pretty much anything that makes a good film – interesting characters, a gripping plot, dramatic tension, actual conflict, etc. – is so conspicuously absent for a ponderously over-long run time that you might almost start to wonder if it isn’t all some art-house exercise – an attempt to make not a bad film, but an anti-good film.
This theory may be affording The Equalizer more thought than anybody involved in the production actually devoted to the cause.
The Equalizer is a little bit like what Taxi Driver would look like stripped of its every positive quality. Bob (Denzel Washington) is a man with a dubious past currently working a menial job in a home improvement store, quietly going about his normal life and befriending a teenage prostitute (Chloe Grace Moritz) on his sleepless nights. After one too many times standing idly by and witnessing an unreported crime, he takes the logical step of taking the law into his own hands.
Of course it would be far too interesting if said teen prostitute actually developed as a character, so once she provides Bob with the motivation to take the law into his own hands, she is unceremoniously dropped from the remainder for the film.
When he ends up killing a made man in the Russian mafia (who he mistook for a low level pimp) Bob finds himself against an army of hired killers, whom he quickly outsmarts with a skill for vigilante justice that would make Batman jealous.
And (spoiler) that’s the movie. At no point does it ever look like Bob has bitten off more than he could chew, or that taking the law into his own hands and electing himself judge jury and executioner is anything other than a great idea. The mere suggestion that there could be consequences to his actions never makes so much as a fleeting appearance.
It is clearly too much to hope that Antoine Fuqua will ever make a film as good as Training Day again. There was plenty of room here to do like Training Day did, to take a standard action thriller, cops and robber set up and insert a bit of moral complexity and examinations of race in contemporary America. But The Equalizer stays well clear of even the hint of such complexity.
It would actually be an overstatement to call this film by-the-numbers. If that was the case there wouldn’t be this much fundamentally wrong with it.
- Bernard O’Rourke |
