Bad, really bad (spoiler alert)

Rating: 2/10 (15 February 2015)

Wow...this was bad, just bad.
McCall has zero character development. I mean literally none. By the end of the film, we know nothing more about him than we do at the start. He's trying to read a hundred books, and obsessively keeps time of things (why?), and... The garbled explanation about his wife was so confusing that I have no idea what was said. I thought at least Nicolai would give an interesting story about McCall in the same way that McCall did about him, but no, we get nothing. So, how am I supposed to care about this robotic assassin?
And the action violence...sigh. Hollywood just needs to stop. The scenarios are so ludicrous anymore as to be embarrassingly laughable. I mean, we see McCall in a room with four or five Russian gangsters, and we just *know* what's gonna happen. The scenes are either so predictable that they're boring beyond belief, or so far-fetched as to be unbelievable. How many times are we gonna see bad guys with guns feeling the need to get within two feet of the hero so that they are vulnerable to Hollywood kung fu? Or how about minions just bringing the protagonist right to the key leader? I just can't suspend my disbelief anymore. In the real world, assassinating a mafia don would be extremely difficult, requiring a lot of planning and luck. McCall just waltzes in and does it in an hour. That's not believable!
And the villains! You know, you need your villain to be credible and effective, or there's no urgency to the threat. Unfortunately, these Russians, despite how tough they look, are powderpuff buffoons! Seriously, McCall dispatches them so easily that they can't be taken seriously. The only one who actually threatens McCall in any way is the bald guy with the tweaked mustache - that was the only point in the whole film when it felt like McCall was in any danger. Other than that, the bad guys just fall for one obvious trick after another.
This truly was a paint-by-numbers, ludicrous, boring waste of time. What did it have to do with the original Equalizer anyway?