Home Depot Alone

Rating: 6/10 (30 December 2014)

I guess this was exactly the kind of movie that it wanted to be: retired nice guy with amazing violence skills gets upset and starts killing people to satisfy his own sense of justice and self importance. Few people remember the Equalizer series, from 1985, starring Edward Woodward and even fewer would recognize similarities with this film, except the name. My guess is that Sony wanted this film to be a kind of pilot for a new TV series.
What really *annoyed* me off was that everything was completely blown out of proportion. Denzel's character goes to help a girl (what else) and kills some Russian mobster in the most ridiculous way possible. But this was just an employee of a bigger mobster, so he sends an uber psychopath to solve the problem. And so this guy has to be killed, hostages enter the fray, captured in some Home Depot thingy, they play 15 minutes of Counter Strike inside, only with household appliances, and so on and so on. They replaced Woodward's brain with Washington's brawn and some ridiculous semblance of planning, since he always wears a stopwatch and measures time for some reason that is never explained.
What can we learn from this film? First of all that if you are an ex-CIA killer you can just assume there is no justice in the world but your own. Also, the other people that could help, like the police, are just hired help for mobsters. And if you are a helpless normal citizen that has to work hard for the slightest pay raise, you will be beaten, sold as a slave, blackmailed when you make a little bit of money, perhaps by corrupt cops, and your only hope is some homicidal maniac who really enjoys killing people in creative ways after bullying them into taking the first shot (he calls this "giving them a chance").
Bottom line: a cliché from top to bottom, this is like A History of Violence on steroids and making little to no sense. A feeler for a TV series that I hope will never be made, it just offends just about everything involved in the plot: the police, the Russian mobsters, any military organization that is not the CIA, democracy, the justice system in its entirety, laptop makers that are not Sony, Home Depot, Ernest Hemingway, Mexicans, fat people... Just say it's a completely average action movie and don't watch it.