By Preston Wilder
They had it, and they threw it all away. That’s the most frustrating thing about The Equalizer, maybe not a terrible film – well OK, the second half is pretty terrible – but a deeply misguided one. At around the one-hour mark, all the pieces are in place, everything’s in balance and we just need a final burst of action for an entertaining 90-minute B-movie. Instead the film gets bloated, swells to an endless 131 minutes and (worst of all) wrecks all its carefully engineered tension for an extended edition of ‘Denzel Washington: What a Badass!’.
Denzel’s a quiet man, somewhat remote and detached, big on self-improvement and healthy living. By day he works in a home-appliance store, well-liked by colleagues, prone to offering sage advice: “Don’t doubt yourself. Doubt kills”. By night he hangs out in a seedy diner, always at the same table, always with a good book, minding his own business. He’ll exchange friendly banter with barely-legal hooker Chloe Grace Moretz, but pointedly ignores the bruises on her face – after all, it’s nothing to do with him – and stiffens visibly when she sits at his table, crossing the line from stranger to acquaintance. I know, she admits, “I’m breaking protocol”. He gives her the Denzel Stare – a complex manoeuvre that allows him to look deep within a person’s soul – and decides to let her stay.
Chloe’s getting beaten up by her pimp, of course, and the pimp is a Russian gangster, and Denzel eventually decides to take action. A best-case scenario might’ve played The Equalizer as a riff on Taxi Driver, another tale of a remote, dangerously self-sufficient man who takes revenge on a pimp on behalf of an underage hooker – and the trump card in Taxi Driver was that Travis Bickle was psychotic (yet heroic), giving the film a delicious ambiguity. Alas, Denzel Washington doesn’t do psychos – he’s far too noble and Denzel-like – but the film could still have played his rectitude as a kind of madness. The scene where he kills a roomful of Russian gangsters single-handed is notably weird: we zoom into his eyes (he’s calculating angles, speed, velocity) then he intones: “16 seconds”. A little later, having done the deed with an assortment of improvised weapons (including a corkscrew through the jaw), he leans over the main gangster, giving the dying man a helpful lecture: “Your life’s going to end, right here… You should’ve taken the money”.
In a word, this is nuts. Even better, Denzel’s antagonist is also nuts – Marton Csokas as the gang’s chief enforcer, brought in from Moss-cow to clean up the mess after our man’s little massacre. Marton’s methods are unorthodox. He beats a guy half to death, pounding his face into the ground (the film’s violence is graphic and extreme), then explains the thinking behind it to a minion: “It’s a message. It says ‘I am here’.” Meanwhile, Denzel’s going full vigilante, punishing corrupt cops then lecturing them like he did that poor gangster: “It’s supposed to stand for something, punk!” he chides, pointing to his police badge.
This is all great, or at least hugely entertaining in a guilty-pleasure kind of way. The quiet man with hidden skills and the soul of a schoolmarm, the purring villain with the silky foreign accent. A cat and mouse game, two obvious nutters locking horns. Then, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, the film falls apart – because Denzel, it turns out, used to be a CIA agent and his powers are superhero-like, should he choose to unveil them. The tension is broken with a visit to his old CIA mentor, where he asks for “permission” – then, once permission has been granted, the final hour is an orgy of revenge.
Never mind the Equalizer, this is more like the Pulverizer. Gangsters fall like ninepins as our hero ploughs through their ranks. He blows up a tanker (I’m not even sure how) then walks away with a giant fireball exploding behind him, the ultimate action cliché. The cat-and-mouse dynamic is gone (the Russian is sadly out of ideas), ditto the nuance of the peaceful man who’s been pushed too far; Denzel is now invulnerable, a killing machine. Worst of all, director Antoine Fuqua plays it depressingly straight. This kind of plot – the lone avenger taking out thugs one by one – goes well with gallows humour, as in Point Blank or its Mel Gibson remake Payback. Even the ultra-flamboyant style of Man on Fire (the obvious model) adds a certain spoofiness, taking the edge off the violence.
The Equalizer features none of that – just a grim, gruelling round of mayhem and torture, unimaginative action and of course the Denzel Stare, a Zen-like inscrutable sadness that could equally mean ‘I don’t like doing this, but I have no choice’ or ‘Should I go get a sandwich later?’. Long before the end of its 131 minutes, the film has become an endurance test. They had it, and they threw it all away.
DIRECTED BY Antoine Fuqua
STARRING Denzel Washington, Marton Csokas, Chloe Grace Moretz
USA 2014 131 mins
