The Equalizer

I finally got around to seeing The Equalizer. It’s been in the theatres for almost a month now but I kept putting it off, mostly because I was sure it was pretty violent and Rosalie doesn’t care much for blood and gore. But, hey, it’s Denzel, right? I’d go to see Denzel just standing around shootin’ the shit with the boys or makin’ commercials for Cialis. He’s really that good. So I went alone with Rosalie’s permission. Most of the reviews were so-so in the middle, sort of backing off from the plot and what director Antoine Fuqua did with the bad-ass character of Robert McCall. But I was pleasantly surprised at how good it was. I leave the long-range, in-depth reviews to better reviewers than I am. I like to keep it simple and just say yes or no or maybe. In this case I’m saying yes. Okay, it may have been a little longer than it needed to be, but the first half, which set up the violence, was necessary. It showed us this good man living a good quiet life in Boston, working at a Home Depot-ish place, going home to his obsessively clean and well-ordered apartment, reading his great books to keep up with his now dead wife who’d been working her way through a list of the 100 greatest, being unable to sleep much, going out to a late-night diner with his teabag for his nightly cup of tea, compulsively lining up his utensils. It was there that he meets Teri (Chloe Grace Moretz), who is nightly waiting for her assignment to a john that her Russian pimp has set her up with. When he tells her his name, she says he looks more like a Robert than a Bob. “Robert reads books,” she says. “Bob watches tv.” You get the drift. All this is part of the set up for the violence that follows. Robert McCall is much more than he seems on the surface, an ex-CIA guy who somehow faked his death to get out of the organization that used him for all sorts of nastiness. All he wants now is a quiet life, a nice routine of work and helping his coworkers with whatever they need, his books, his tea. But when Teri (whose real name is Alina) is beaten bloody by her pimp because she’d punched a psychotic john, McCall decides to rectify her situation. And that leads him to doing battle with the Russian enforcer Teddy (Marton Csokas) sent to Boston to find and kill whoever had done such damage to the Russian mob’s enterprises. Sure, the violence is predictable, but who cares? It’s Denzel doing his Liam Neeson impression, and doing it even better than Neeson does it. And the ending certainly reserves the possibility of more Equalizers down the road. I’d have to give it four of five stars. Go see it if you like Denzel as much as I do, and uou can stand a bit of gore. Oh, yeah, a bit more than a bit.