A bottom-shelf action thriller barely salvaged by its top-drawer leading man.

Rating: 4/10 (24 September 2014)

It's a tantalising thought: Denzel Washington reunites with director Antoine Fuqua for a pulse-racing thriller about a man who seeks to right ('equalise') wrongs done to innocent people. Perhaps they can once again hit upon that thrilling blend of action and drama they cooked up in Training Day, which won Washington his second Oscar. Unfortunately, Washington is pretty much the only good thing about The Equalizer, which is really little more than a pulpy straight-to-DVD film rescued by the efforts and charisma of its leading man.
Robert McCall (Washington) keeps his head down and his profile low at his new job in a hardware store - clearly hoping that the ghosts of his past will eventually disappear. When he befriends Teri (Chloe Moretz), a desperate waif forced by the Russian mafia into prostitution, he finally decides to help people with the death-dealing skills he's been trying to keep hidden. After Robert's bruisingly bloody confrontation with Teri's pimp, the terrifyingly efficient Terry (Marton Csokas) is dispatched by his Russian gang-lord to get to the bottom of things.
This is the kind of thriller in which the bad guy - portrayed as enormously smart and powerful - lets the good guy slip out of his grasp for reasons of prolonging the film's running time. There's even an extended sequence at the end of the film in which Terry just stalks through a gigantic warehouse for something like twenty whole minutes, never finding Robert until their climactic show-off. Fuqua's film is almost unapologetically pulpy too, setting Robert up as an ultra-violent vigilante who gives his antagonists the "choice" to clean up their acts before he does it for them.
It'd have been great if The Equalizer had dared to be a little more introspective, delving into the moral greys and difficulties Robert encounters in hunting down Terry and his gang. But, in the bloodshed that explodes all around Robert (most of it caused by him in almost chillingly cold blood), it actually becomes harder and harder to tell whether we're supposed to be rooting for Robert in the first place - even as the film practically yells at us that he's the most heroic person in this entire godforsaken mess.
Truthfully, The Equalizer is the kind of film you'd imagine with Jason Statham in the lead - a disposable action-thriller with murky morals that exists solely for car-chase sequences and bullet-play. The fact that it stars Washington is both to its credit and its disgrace. He makes the film worth a watch, actually finding something a little human within a character who wasn't really all that well-rounded on the page. But Fuqua also wastes him, failing to find and colour in the layers and depth Washington could so easily have given Robert. For what it's worth, Csokas is a worthy adversary, stone-cold and utterly brutal, who stands up quite well against Washington.
To be fair, Fuqua directs the film with his trademark ferocity, and many scenes drip gore, menace and tension in equal measure. There's even a little welcome comedy courtesy of Ralphie (Johnny Skourtis), the wannabe security guard who becomes the film's accidental hero. But it's not really enough to save The Equalizer from itself - the film practically begs to be allowed to build a new franchise around its butt-kicking protagonist, but fails to prove why anyone but the most die-hard of action aficionados would really want to see much more of Mr. McCall.