![]() ![]() ![]() Today’s lucrative late-career action stars are, for the most part, cashing in on their greatest hits and pre-established celebrity. There’s even a sequence in which a delivery truck for the Boston Herald aids Robert’s getaway from the murder scene: torture, with a pro-reading message! Torture, with a pro-reading message!Īll of this has a strange commercial logic. The Equalizer, by contrast, makes critical thinking and efficient killing fairly synonymous. These kinds of analytical breakdowns of a character's mental process were first made popular on the BBC series Sherlock, where the stakes are often equally explosive but the characters are less mentorlike. The movie’s very upfront about its educational component: Before my screening, Sony brought in an MMA fighter to demonstrate some self-defense moves. Point-of-view slow-motion shots during fight scenes cue the audience into the thinking that goes into the making of a useful microwave bomb, or how to dress gunshot wounds using the contents of the common cupboard. As Robert gets on with the slaughter of dozens of pimps and criminals, the movie becomes a primer in how to read an everyday situation and then determine the best ways in which to kill the people in it. Which means his character’s pedantic in the ways of kicking ass, too. And so it is that Denzel’s gotta be what Denzel’s gotta be: an East Coast crime-syndicate-conquering avenger with a thing for inventive, DIY torture, and the star of another “ Geri-Action” blockbuster. You gotta be who you are in this world, no matter what,” he replies. Why doesn’t the old man just let the fish go, Alina asks in one scene? “Old man’s gotta be the old man, fish has gotta be the fish. But he also uses Hemingway to explain why, after she gets beaten to a pulp by her cruel Russian pimp, he embarks on an unrelenting killing spree that begins with the perpetrators and then extends to Boston’s criminal underworld at large. Robert uses Hemingway to bolster his advice that Alina should start following her dreams, not streetwalking. ![]() Denzel’s pedantic in the ways of kicking ass, too. By night he’s proffering life advice to the troubled young prostitute Alina (Chloë Grace Moretz) at a 24-hour diner and schooling her on The Old Man and the Sea, all of which savors of Remember the Titans’ teachings (Gettysburg history) or The Great Debaters’ uplifting lectures (Langston Hughes). He befriends an employee in need of some weight-loss motivation, warning against the ills of sodium and refined sugar-and seemingly leads by example, too, for almond milk is visible in his grocery bag. By day Robert manages in an orange apron at the movie’s equivalent of the Home Depot, Home Mart (product placement abounds in this very commercial movie, but apparently the hardware retailer wasn’t eager to lend its name to what becomes, essentially, the Equalizer’s serial-killing supply closet). This is all to say that The Equalizer synthesizes Washington's uber-character: a righteous assassin who is also a deep lover of, and sometimes-teacher of, literature.Īt the movie’s open, our hero Robert McCall (“Bob” to those who don’t know him) is more apt scholar than aging-gentleman action hero. He makes easy friends with young, lost people in need of instruction he makes enemies pretty quickly, too (or he would, if only he allowed them to live long enough to develop opinions). He passes a lot of time reading leatherbound, gold-embossed classics of the Western canon he spends the rest of his time killing. In it, he delivers English lectures, uplifting speeches, dance moves (to Gladys Knight & the Pips), and brutal staple-gun assassinations. That’s what makes The Equalizer, out in theaters today, the ultimate Denzel movie. ![]()
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