Checked out Denzel Washington in the remake of an 80s action show I never watched – The Equalizer movie. In it, he plays an action hero with OCD (unstated but implied) who works for Home Depot (basically) and lectures people about how to be the best version of themselves. Then he helps them out… and helping people is where things go wrong so the moral I took from the movie was don’t help people or the Russian mob will send hired goons after you.
Denzel is fine in the movie where he plays someone so hyper-competent, there’s never any real chance of him screwing up, getting hurt, making mistakes, or getting randomly shot when he does something that should have gotten him randomly shot, etc. Hell, he even has a “cool guys don’t look at explosions” scenes… in slow mo. It helps that this movie provides a pretty scary villain who is almost as calm and collected and competent as he is (you can tell he’s evil because he’s Russian and has a lot of tattoos… and beats people to death to send a message).
Hyper competent Russian baddie and our hero have some good dialog-driven cat and mouse scenes with each other and there’s actually a fair amount of slow burn and conversations in the movie. All of which get chucked out the door by a fairly ponderous final action scene where all the villain competence gets shrugged off as Denzel goes all Home Depot Alone on the bad guys (scene takes place in the Home Depot analog in the movie using traps). These scenes are so generic, we get “cool guy makes an entrance in slow mo while being rained on” shot. I fully expected him to kill a bad guy in a super stylish way and say, “You’ve been Equalized, bitch!” but they managed to withhold that Cool Guy Says Something Cool moment.
So basically what we have is a fairly generic storyline propped up by some stylish cinematography, some slower pacing than expected (but welcome), some good dialog scenes… and then a dumb action ending… and then two or three more endings than expected or needed.
It’s not a bad movie and is, in fact, fairly good for most of its 2hr 10 minute run time.
Score: 77