You're supposed to stand for something, punk.I am offering you a chance to do the right thing.When you pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud too.Yours is gonna end right here, on this funky floor… over ninety-eight hundred dollars.
Alina, the girl you beat half to death, her life’s gonna go on.
In about 30 seconds, your body’s gonna shut down, and you’ll suffocate. It’s because you’re losing so muct blood. Your heart is beating at three times the normal rate.Advice to a co-worker in a hardware store, training to be a security guard.When even your star, one of the most charismatic actors working, can’t bring anything to the movie, you know you’re in trouble. There’s a hint of charm in the early scenes when he’s coaching his friends to improve their lives, but as soon as the story proper kicks in he becomes a blank mask of what is supposed to be grim determination, but it looks more like boredom.
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Rounding out the list of insults is that Washington is asleep in much of the movie (which does nothing to help the rather blasé way he murders his way through it). Like Wenk, Fuqua is totally tone-deaf to the fact that his main character is a psycho, so trying to make McCall cool just makes it all worse. McCall gets at least three slow-motion hero walks, one complete with cliché water dripping down his face, and most of the action sequences are sloppily staged. (He also blows up an oil tanker belonging to the Russians’ oligarch boss regardless of any potential collateral damage.) That’s sociopathic behavior right there.ĭirector Antoine Fuqua worked wonders with Washington in “Training Day,” but here he just blithely follows the revenge movie template without any of the nuance that made “Training Day” as good as it is. He uses bottles, corkscrews, power tools, nail guns and more to do serious, bloody damage to the bad guys, and he appears to actively enjoy inflicting as much pain as possible instead of simply taking them down quickly. McCall has solid fighting skills, but the movie has him come up with a number of homemade weapons and do-it-yourself deathtraps that are straight out of a slasher movie. The movie also has a disconcerting sadistic streak. This is downright vile, and it speaks to a disturbing attitude toward women on the part of Wenk. It’s lazy, despicable and misogynistic.īut it doesn’t end there! This is also a movie that, to demonstrate how evil the bad guys are, has lead bad guy Teddy (Martin Csokas) - who of course has satanic tattoos all over his body and speaks in an atrocious Russian accent - strangle one of Teri’s prostitute friends on-screen. This is the definition of simply using a woman, a prostitute no less, to do nothing but motivate a male character. And then she disappears for the rest of the movie until a faux-heartfelt reunion at the end. The movie wants us to think he’s a hero, as evidenced by a cringingly bad moment when McCall’s prostitute friend Teri (Chloe Grace Moretz) asks him about another book he’s reading and he responds, “It’s a book about a knight in shining armor in a world when knights don’t exist anymore.” But it’s hard to root for a guy who lets a teenage - possibly underage - girl continue to be a prostitute until she’s beat up not once, but TWICE. It’s also either profoundly confused or deeply misguided about whether Washington’s character, Robert McCall, is an anti-hero or not. The script by Richard Wenk is as good a place to start as any, as it asks us to believe that having a middle-aged character prominently reference Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” is subtle characterization. This movie is so anger-inducing it’s difficult to nail down where the root of its issues lies. The result is a movie that’s blatantly, proudly misogynistic and sociopathic, a disgrace to everyone involved and to the intelligence of the poor moviegoers who pay to see it. Except that the few things that “Taken” did well (what a world we live in when you can hold that movie up as an exemplar), “The Equalizer” not only doesn’t do well, but gets totally wrong. Inspired by the likes of “Taken” and other popular flicks about middle-aged tough guys dealing out righteous vengeance on evildoers, here’s Denzel Washington as a former CIA agent dishing out the pain to a bunch of generic Eastern Bloc toughs who’ve beat up his prostitute friend. You can see the genesis of a half-decent movie here. “The Equalizer” is one of the latter, unquestionably the low point for movies so far in 2014. If you made a greatest hits list of bad moviemaking trends, you’d end up with something like “The Equalizer.” There are movies that are badly made but more or less inoffensive, and then there are movies that are actively harmful, that promote bad ideas and do actual damage to your brain while you watch them.
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