Ultraviolent and yet thoughtful

Rating: 7/10 (23 February 2015)

In this film, Denzel Washington as a former agent-turned-Home Depot associate "Bob" is confronted with the question: Must he act against injustices instead of just standing by, given his past training as assassin, given who he is?
He befriends a hooker, who thinks he is rather a "Robert" than a "Bob," and she is right of course. They always chat at the same diner, where he sits at a meticulously arranged table reading is latest book, such as "Old Man and the Sea." When she, a singer at heart, is brutally mutilated by her pimp, something snaps and Robert starts offering the bad guys an option: behave, or die. None of them take him seriously until they are dying. This attracts the attention of the highest echelon of Russian crimelords: they can't figure out who is messing with their US operations.
The movie starts out very quietly introducing Washington's character as a man of precision, reader of a good novel every night, and helper in his community. Then it turns hyperviolent to set the tone of Robert as a clockwork killer. He assesses each situation, estimates time to mission completion, sets his stopwatch and... proceeds to cut out eyes with broken glass rims, drill though necks, strangle people with barbed wire, and so forth. Then he washes up and goes back to work.
Once the film has established his extreme capabilities, it dials the mayhem way back to focus on a cat-and-mouse game between Robert and the Russian emissary who comes after him. By the time Robert blows up the crimelord's shipyard and neutralizes their money laundering operation, we are willing to believe that he could do it, never mind the details. Plot holes are avoided, such as when Robert gets permission from his former Agency bosses to clean up the Russians.
The climax in Robert's store is well played. As the emissary dies, one can tell that this is an incredible situation for him: how could he, who dispatches people like lint, suddenly be the lint? Unfortunately, the film then commits the sin of Hollywood action flicks incapable of quitting while ahead of the game. When Robert has walked off into the night, the film needed a quiet shot of the unoccupied diner table, open to page three of a newspaper announcing a Russian mafia lord in Moscow has been assassinated, then panning over to the latest reading material "Invisible Man." Instead, we get an unnecessary scene of electrocution of said mafia lord in Moscow, and Robert happily ever after meeting up with his friends, as though he could (Agency permission or not) despite all the FBI and police have learned. All to loud rock music that does not fit the tone of a man quietly equalizing the world for the weak. And then Robert gets his first text message to "save someone" on his iPad, the call for the sequel.
Could have been 8 stars without the botched ending, but a good film even so.