Such a waste of good material and acting

Rating: 2/10 (17 November 2016)

This movie was such a disappointment I felt compelled to write my first review. Denzel Washington usually does a good job of selecting movies to star in that are good for what they are. Some are deeper than others but that is OK because whether the movie is mindless action, deeply inspirational, comedy, of some other genre it is still entertaining if it is done well. This is the first movie I have seen of Washington's where I felt the movie was well below average.
The acting was fine but the storyline was stupid. It alternated between trying to be deep and thought provoking only to then have the characters do things that would be incredibly stupid in real life. The writers and directors were just being lazy and having characters do things to make a point they wanted to make or to advance the plot with no regard for whether or not it made sense for that character to take that action.
I loved the Equalizer series. Part of the charm was that Edward Woodward was a secret agent who was past his prime. He was still very competent, but he had to rely more on planning and getting help from others. I knew that would be difficult to do in a movie format instead of a series but I had hoped that with Denzel in the movie it would at least be good. Instead, the movie starts interesting enough, then gets stupid spoiling the more thoughtful storyline, has a brief intense action scene, and then for the rest of the movie I had lost respect for the credibility of the plot and was alternatively bored at the attempts for depth, the laziness of contrived plot points, and the over the top action.
This movie was such a waste of talented actors. The actors did a good job with the well written plot line and if the movie would have stuck to trying to be a story driven drama it would have been very good. The action scenes were good but getting to them seemed contrived. It was like they wrote the action scenes then had to figure out how to work them into the movie. If the movie wanted to just be an action movie with very little meaningful plot the scenes would have been very good but there needed to be more action.
I can't recommend this movie to anyone. If you are in the mood for action, there is not enough. If you want a compelling storyline, they do not tell it well and insert dumb scenes into the movie to either preach at the audience or to give an excuse for the action scenes. It seemed to me like the people making the movie had a good story but then were worried that the general viewing public would be to stupid to get the point if they did not include lots of talking about the evils of (no spoilers) and then throw in some action scenes for the masses.
I still plan on watching any movie with Denzel Washington in it, this rubbish was not his fault unless he had creative input. But I continue to be disappointed at the large number of movies being produced that seem to cobbled together to reach an audience but lack focus on being entertaining.