The male pendant to maternal instinct is what I like to call the provider's burden. A man feels the powerful and preternatural need to provide physical, financial and emotional security to people he cares about, whether it's family or friends. It's something that's been harvested times and times over for storytelling purposes in literature, comic books and Hollywood, wherever it would prompt a story that could be enjoyed. The original Equalizer, airing on CBS in the 1980s, was pretty much an embodiment of the provider's burden. The character was rebooted for a movie project starring Denzel Washington, which shows slight promise, yet can't escape the poor quality of its writing. THE EQUALIZER was supposed to be a rebirth, but it's more or less dead on arrival.
Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) is a seemingly lonely man working in a hardware store, minding his own business and living a quiet existence. He's a restless man though, unable to sleep at night. He seems to be waiting for something, a sign from life itself. That sign comes one night in a cage when his companion of solitude, a budding singer turned escort (Chloe Grace Moretz) gets beat up by a client. Robert meets her pimp, a hilarious Eastern European stereotype named Slavi (David Meunier, better known as Cousin Johnny from Justified), as he walks her home and then shit hits the fan. Robert McCall is not a quiet man after all, he's a freakin' government trained killing machine hell bent on street justice, sometimes as the expense of his own well-being. Something he doesn't seem to give a fuck about.
THE EQUALIZER is a seducing thought. Denzel Washington's interpretation of Robert McCall is subtle, detail-oriented and original. He plays the middle-aged man to near perfection, wearing shirts tucked in his pants, joking at the expense of his younger co-workers, showing maturity in the way he carries himself. So it's satisfying as hell when McCall starts dropping bodies like Mike Tyson because it creates a strong contrast of character with what we know of him. Too bad the storytelling in the actual action leaves to be desired though.
There are so many clichés in the actual action parts of the movie that I lost count: sophisticated Russian gangsters, kind-hearted hookers in peril, a terrified Mexican family owning a taco joint, a man walking away from an explosion, a government op taking a helicopter ride in her lavish backyard, that sort of stuff. THE EQUALIZER is actually crawling with it. Clichés like that rub me the wrong way, because they're lazy. Whoever wrote the screenplay for THE EQUALIZER took for granted that everyone loves kind-hearted hookers and terrified Mexican families, therefore everybody will care about the movie because they're in it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is bullshit.
I wasn't kidding.
It's too bad, because the action scenes in THE EQUALIZER are a lot of fun. They are stylish, brutal and have a strong identity. The entire movie seems designed around the fact that it doesn't give a fuck what it's saying, as long as it packs a satisfying number of gruesome kills. Robert McCall's hardware store job, for example, is a hilarious excuse for the usage of unorthodox murder weapons. If THE EQUALIZER wasn't wallowing so much in clichés and lazy writing, it could've been a fun and infinitely more engaging pulp experience that would've gnawed its way to cult status. I'm not into government trained killers à la Jason Bourne, but THE EQUALIZER made it fun and it's an accomplishment in itself. Too bad the rest of the movie was written on a napkin, at lunch hours, to paraphrase my old friend Bob.
I know THE EQUALIZER seems like a lot of fun. It presents itself very well. Maude Lebowski would say that its weakness is vanity. It's a hollow movie, though and you'll realize that as soon as Robert McCall hits a patch of bad guys. If the golden age of pulp taught us anything, it's that it's easy to write (and produce?) something fun in very little time. So you gotta be spectacularly lazy to turn a golden concept like The Equalizer into some uninspired clichéfest. I know it's fun that Denzel's badass again. I know it's also fun that another kickass 1980s concept got brought back to life, but don't bite, folks. This one's more style than substance. It's watchable, but don't get your hopes up.
