Disappointingly sterile, emotionless, Chuck Norris style acting.

Rating: 3/10 (13 December 2014)

Robert McCall is a humble big box hardware store employee with an extensive background in the CIA. He has a few coworkers with whom he's superficially friendly, but they know nothing of his secret life until the latter half of the movie.
He befriends a young woman working as a prostitute for the Russian mob, and upon seeing their brutality against her he goes to bat on her behalf and goes to the Russian's HQ to offer them $9,800 to leave her alone. The Russian pimp and his associates don't care for the offer and the first mêlée of the movie ensues, and of course Denzel's character emerges, victorious and unscathed, stopping his stopwatch once the carnage has concluded.
Throughout this movie, the Robert McCall character is, literally, a stone-faced killer. Whereas the original British character from The Equalizer TV series (played admirably by the late Edward Woodward) is a vigilante, helping all sorts of underdogs with his trade craft and connections, this Robert McCall focuses primarily on just the one woman who needs a hand. The original expressed emotion, had a much richer tapestry of a background, whereas this one is pretty bland. The character is as two-dimensional and stark as his rather Spartan apartment. I don't recall seeing an actor as lacking in emotions and facial expressions since Chuck Norris.
Some of the confrontations McCall has with the Russians seems to hearken back to Denzel Washington's exemplary role as former CIA operative John Creasy in the remake of Man On Fire, directed by the late Tony Scott, but are far less visceral. Whereas Creasy exacts furious vengeance upon one corrupt official after another, whether by cutting one's fingers off one by one or annihilating them with rectally-inserted C4 explosive, McCall uses hands-on martial arts to dispatch his foes. Creasy's acts are fired by emotion, but McCall's don't seem fired up all that much at all. I thought for a bit I was watching a black Terminator. Even when McCall has a corrupt cop trapped in his own car at his own home, exhaust pumping in and the cop's life in his hands, he is passionless and methodical. I felt no compelling reason to cheer McCall on, no reason to root for him as I did John Creasy.
In the final confrontation with the Russian hit squad, the action is sterile and uninspired. McCall is in his element in a way, finding propane tanks and nail guns and other stuff like a black MacGyver in his workplace to take out the bad guys, but this is not at all what I'd expect from Antoine Fuqua after seeing the kind of bad-ass action his characters dealt in Training Day.
Some odd trivia, in the first half of the movie (specifically, when McCall is wearing ear protection and sawing plywood) you might recognize a few bits of the score from Man On Fire, just briefly. In the final scene, they've recycled Moby's hit song "New Dawn Fades" used in the movie Heat by Michael Mann in the 90s.
I'm glad I didn't pay to see this.