For those of us in high school in the mid-to-late 1980s, The Equalizer was a minor consolation to being home on a Friday night.
The CBS series, with its focus on a gruff former special agent named Robert McCall who spent his retirement as a New York City vigilante for hire by the desperate, was stylish, moody, and violent in a way like no other TV show — including Miami Vice.
The latter was a prettied-up police procedural set in trendy and exotic Miami with its beautiful people, drugs, and expensive cars and clothes. The Equalizer wore trench coats and gloves, was always smarter than the villains, and frequently administered a brutal lesson to the wrong-doers.
Nearly three decades after the show’s premiere, The Equalizer finds itself on the big screen, with no less than two-time Oscar winner Denzel Washington replacing British actor Edward Woodward in the title role, minus the trench coat and evocative score by Stewart Copeland (best known as the drummer for The Police).
★★
Directed by Antoine Fuqua.
Written by Richard Wenk, based on the TV series.
A Columbia Pictures release, playing at Franklin Park, Fallen Timbers, and Levis Commons.
Rated R for strong bloody violence and language throughout, including some sexual references.
Running time: 131 minutes.
Cast: Denzel Washington, Chloe Grace Moretz, Marton Csokas.
In what is essentially an origins story, the retired deadly agent with a murky past spends his days as a friendly manager at a national hardware store chain location in Boston. Think of Home Depot, only without the branding.
Everyone likes McCall, especially an overweight clerk he is helping get in shape to qualify for a career promotion to store security.
Instead of sleeping, McCall spends his nights hanging out at a local diner, where he reads classic literature and chats with a teenage prostitute named Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz, who essentially has a cameo role) working for Russian gangsters. Teri has aspirations to be a pop star and only needs the opportunity to break free from her Russian pimp to make it happen. She even has her own CD!
But when Teri is nearly beaten to death by her boss, McCall has no choice but to take up her cause and exact revenge.
In his former life as the best U.S. agent ever, McCall did bad things in the name of the country. Things that still haunt him and haunted his now-deceased wife. And now he’ll do it again, easily eliminating a room of tough-guy Russians. Without knowing it, McCall has just declared war on a powerful and wealthy mob boss in Mother Russia, who dispatches his own deadly assassin (Marton Csokas) to take care of McCall.
The Russian killer is a worthy adversary to McCall, with similarly violent tactics, and the chess match between them, each attempting to learn more about their opponent — identity, weaknesses — and set up traps, is the most interesting aspect of the film.
Still, most fans of the original TV show will be disappointed by the film’s style-less substance via filmmaker Antoine Fuqua, who directed Washington to his second Oscar as the bad guy cop in 2001’s Training Day.
Television in the 1980s limited the amount of violence and blood spilling into U.S. living rooms. But Fuqua takes full advantage of an R-rating, particularly in the novel ways that McCall metes out punishment with just about anything his keen awareness notices: nail guns, chairs, a glass, a microwave.
At least McCall offers each victim a chance to avoid their grisly fate. It’s when they decline ... well, what good is a corkscrew if you can’t jab it in a mobster’s eye?
Moviegoers born in the 1990s are likely to have never seen The Equalizer, which ran from 1985 through 1989. And those who are nostalgic for the show will hardly recognize it in this film.
The question, then, is who exactly is The Equalizer for?
The answer is its star.
Washington continues his persistent reinvention as an action hero, perhaps vying for a spot in The Expendables franchise. (The Equalizer was written by Richard Wenk, who also penned The Expendables 2 screenplay.)
If nothing else, The Equalizer affords Washington the opportunity to play his version of Batman, only without the suit and expensive gadgets, and a Bruce Wayne without the mansion and wealth and who is employed as a hardware manager.
But even Batman put away the cowl and cape and moved on with his life at the end of The Dark Knight Rises.
As good as Washington is in everything he does — including this run-of-the-mill actioner — one wishes the talented actor would retire the action hero outfit as well.
Contact Kirk Baird at kbaird@theblade.com or 419-724-6734.
First Published September 25, 2014, 4:00 a.m.
