John Byrne is unimpressed with The Equalizer, Denzel Washington-starring vigilante killer movie loosely based on the hit 1980s' TV series of the same name.
Much of the violence in The Equalizer (16) is gratuitous and that's a put-off that pops up early in this film. One example being when the good guy kills a bad guy by shoving a corkscrew upwards through his chin so that it protrudes inside his open mouth like a curly metal tongue. There's also a shoot-out involving a nail gun that has put me off ever going into a DIY warehouse ever again - which, I must admit, is quite a positive.
After this screening, I mentioned to another journalist that Taxi Driver, one of Martin Scorsese's greatest films, put its violence into context as it told the simmering story of Travis Bickle, and viewers saw him gradually reach a point where he exploded and dealt his own form of extreme justice.
But in The Equalizer there is no context before it all kicks off. One moment, Denzel Washington's character Robert McCall is a smiling, benign warehouse worker with a touch of OCD; the next he's a clinical, sadistic killer.
The basic plot is pretty bog-standard, with the central character loosely based on the role played by Edward Woodward in a TV series of the same name, about a long-coated vigilante who administered street justice with a long-barrelled gun that looked like it could decapitate a continent.
Here, Washington is a restless man living alone, who reads avidly and spends a substantial amount of night time in a local diner chatting to a wannabe pop star who's really a prostitute. She's under the spell of some Russian gangsters who allow her to be treated roughly, so when she's hospitalised by a regular client McCall decides to mulch the mobsters.
In response, the mob boss sends a sociopathic fixer in to sort out the mess - cue more corpses and carnage until it's time for the inevitable stand-off. And so begins a franchise...
John Byrne
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