Washington vs Russians, 2014 edition

Rating: 6/10 (13 December 2014)

It's hard to invent anything new in the genre of the action movies. The Equalizer is no exception. This time, we have Denzel Washington as a nice and hard-working employee of a big hardware store, who comes to a nearby diner at nights to read. But when a young Slavic hooker named Alina, who he occasionally talks to, gets into trouble, this old man, 'dedushka' as the Russian mobsters call him, decides to put some people-killing skills he tries so hard to forget about to work.
The movies where a small and quiet man is revealed to be some sort of retired John Rambo who gets back to business for the sake of justice are always a guilty pleasure. You can predict almost all the plot turns, and it's not like it turns all that much, but still you end up rooting for the good guy, simply because all of us sometimes wish that such people really existed in this world. The whole idea of a one-man-army doing the impossible so that the weak and exploited of this world could finally have some peace in their lives will never die as long as we live in a society ridden with criminals and ruled by corruption.
Too bad that a likable protagonist doesn't automatically make a movie excellent. And that is why the filmmakers use all the tricks up their sleeves to persuade us to turn off the brain and judge by emotions only. Cruel and dumb mobsters, poor young girls who need protection, ruthless boss villains who seem to have no single positive trait about them, and all that is financed with the Russian oil. Awesome sauce.
I do admit, with the way my country behaves lately in terms of the international matters, the return of the old-school image of a Russian evil is very well timed. And i personally have nothing against it, after all, we do deserve to be treated as a threat. I just wish it was done in a fresher way. Denzel Washington is without a doubt a great action movie actor, but it looks like he'll hardly top what he did almost a decade ago in Training Day. Now that was really intense, there he really had to break a sweat to get the job done. On the other hand, in The Equalizer things simply happen the way he needs, so this action thriller inevitably loses the thrills it tried to hold. And while the villain guy was moderately believable as a worthy opponent, and the final scene in the hardware store was really impressive, those were probably the only things in which this movie actually tries to stand out.
On the other hand, with a little imagination this average action movie may turn into a very dead on political satire. Evil Russians are exploiting and brutalizing a girl with a rather Ukrainian name 'Alina', and a black man with a profile resembling Barack Obama's and a last name 'Washington' that speaks for itself, manages to singlehandedly deal with all the bad guys and tops it with killing the mob kingpin, whose last name starts with 'Pu' and ends with 'in', in his Moscow mansion. Since we all know that the real mobsters prefer London to Moscow, it makes the allusion even clearer. And the fact that the movie was obviously filmed before the recent political turmoil makes it almost prophetic.
But even if that interpretation is just a pipe dream, this movie is not that bad. Especially since for an eye candy it has Chloe-Grace Moretz who's obviously trying to do more various roles but still can't help ending up in the same cute, a little clumsy and somewhat childish image. Not that we don't love her for that, do we? ;)
The bottom line is: if you want to see a decent action movie where the good guys win and the bad guys die, or if you like to find the hidden meaning where there probably is none - then The Equalizer's your game. But don't expect anything close to Training Day from it, this way you'll save yourself from unnecessarily high expectations and disappointment that usually follows.