More of Denzel's pious cool

Rating: Null/10 (22 December 2014)

This is coherent and stylized which is more than can be said about many films. Middle-aged Bob working the Home Depot decides on a whim to help the tormented girl who shares the same diner and happens to be a call- girl for the mob, only of course he's no ordinary man. Zatoichi-like powers of perception and just as deadly. The film in fact recalls Jarmusch's riff on Zatoichi, complete with kindly taciturn hero who lives monk-like in the midst of a comic-book violence.
This is the American cool that comes from what we infer the lone hero has had chiseled away from him by sacrifice, it's not the Italian cool of Leone or the Japanese cool of Kurosawa. So there is a heavyhandedness about doing the right thing, a churchlike piousness, which when coupled with suavely evil Russians to whom gory justice is served in a myriad ways suggests just the opposite of introspectiveness.
The last third is a complete bust, nondescript shootout, and then just like that show up in Moscow and back home again for the girl to pop up from around a corner and announce that she has "changed her world". Denzel smiles understandingly. Denzel by the looks of it has got a new franchise to toy around with for the next several years that lets him inhabit the same avenger persona as always.