Nice acting but a bit confused on the character build up

Rating: 6/10 (3 October 2014)

McCall looks like a normal man who works at a home DIY supply store. Helping coworkers and leading a routine life, he does also have peculiar habits of bringing supplies of his own even when dining at his frequent diner. There he meets Teri, a girl hooked onto some nasty men. Standing idle when seeing Teri being picked up forcefully, McCall takes action after one night he finds her beaten up badly. McCall quickly dispatches five Russian mobsters when a deal for Teri, whose real name is Alina, goes sour, The mafia boss in Moscow sends in Teddy his ex Spetznas henchman to track the killer. Meanwhile, McCall lies low after the incident, but it turns out that his own sense of justice is rekindled, secretly exacting vengeance toughly and often violently those who he encounters while being wronged.
His actions soon lead him to focus on disrupting the New York branch of the Russian mafia's operation. Teddy finally catches up to him. After escaping several of Teddy's attempts on his life, McCall contacts his old colleagues in the CIA for info on Teddy. It turns out that McCall was an elite black ops operative who faked his own death in exchange for a quiet life. With his new info, McCall plans to take out the Russian mafia kingpin, Pushkin. But Teddy finds McCall's 'weakness', those he cares about. He then takes McCall's coworkers as hostages to reel him in. McCall tactically dispatches Teddy and his men, without having any conventional weapon. He then finishes his plan on Pushkin, making it to look like an accident. After that McCall receives many e-mails asking for help on similar cases.
The story kind of opens weakly, focusing on the mystery of the main character's background and building on the peculiar things he does. This approach kind of loses its relevance when out of a sudden McCall launches on his slow motion weakness analysis scene. If not for the promotion as a action movie and the TV series background, not many viewers will get the connection between McCall and his ability here. Also, the slow motion analysis thing is nothing new as we can have a better and more entertaining version in Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes movies. They are more detailed with all those commentaries on them.
Again, having the main character's background not developed adequately feels quite strange to those who watch this movie without knowing beforehand the movie's background as based on a TV series. This feels strange because the movie has so many places to put hints and minor details that could subtly point McCall's background out.
Well at least the story unravels itself very much predictably. That means there's nothing unpredictable with this movie, no surprising plot twist nor a grand finale. There's even a poorly done story deviation on the sequence of Teddy's brush with the Irish, which doesn't really contribute anything to the greater picture. Yet the story nicely depicts a black ops supposedly uncanny resourcefulness in using mostly everyday items for combat or even medical purposes.
The action bits are quite sufficient for my expectations. You can't really expect aging stars as Denzel Washington to have action scenes with a lot of heavy motions here and there. Antoine Fuqua compensates this by using closer takes on the action scenes, particularly on the fighting parts. There is also not much running or any other classic action moves such as duck-and-roll.
The acting feels nice in overall. Denzel Washington really can act out any kind of character you throw him. His calm composure really depicts what we expect from an experienced elite black ops guy, especially if we compare his role here to his other more talkative roles such as in Training Day or The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. Marton Csokas is very much at home with this kind of role as his similar role in xXx alongside Vin Diesel was his first big break. Chloe-Grace Moretz second performance this year makes this movie better. Here she shows that she can take on the varied nature of characters.
My final word for The Equalizer is that this movie deserves just a mere 6 out of 10 score. A recommendation is quite a so-so decision. Honestly it's quite entertaining as a movie, but all the predictability of the story and the not-so-solid character building has left some damage to the overall presentation.