Movie Review: The Equalizer (2014)

An action movie starring Denzel? Where do I sign?

Ladies and gents… “The Equalizer”.

Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) is a man with a dark and mysterious past that he has put behind himself. When we meet him he lives a quiet and happy life working at a hardware store. However, when a local girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) gets the shit beaten out of her by some Russian gangsters, McCall gets back into action to try to stop the assholes. And now we have a tale of an older man kicking the asses of bad dudes because of a young girl and holy shit, this is “Taken”. Okay fine, it’s not exactly like “Taken”, but you can’t deny the similarities. With that said, the plot here is not great. It’s not bad, but it’s also not the most compelling or interesting. There’s also a bunch of side stories to it. You have the main one which is McCall in trouble with the Russians, but then you also have various side plots featuring him helping people out. Combine all these side things with a main plot that is really average and you get a little bit of a mess. Again, not bad. It’s just… fine.

The characters in this movie are all pretty entertaining and surprisingly interesting. Robert McCall is a character that we don’t know a lot about in the movie, but he’s still interesting. You can tell that those eyes have seen some shit. And Denzel Washington is awesome in the role,but you knew that already… IT’S DENZEL! Chloë Grace Moretz isn’t in the movie for too long, but she does give a really good performance as this young and troubled woman. Marton Csokas (How the fuck do you pronounce his last name, send help) plays the main bad guy of the movie and this is a character that you can tell knows what the hell he’s doing. And Csokas (seriously, help) is great in the role even though he always seems like he’s two seconds away from letting out an evil cackle. David Harbour plays one of Csokas’ (please) helpers/allies, and he’s really good. We also get Haley Bennett as a prostitute and she gives a really good performance. Overall it’s a very well acted movie.

The score was composed by Harry Gregson-Williams and it was really good. It was dramatic, tense, exciting, and overall fit the movie very well. There were also a bunch of licensed tracks troughout the movie and they were used very well too.

This movie was directed by Antoine Fuqua and I think he did a really good job. Overall it is a really good looking movie that perfectly captures the uneasy and grimy feel of Boston’s underworld. And the action scenes in the movie are quite fun. What I especially like about them is that McCall doesn’t just a grab a gun and start some simple shooty-bang-bang against the bad guys, but he more often than not will figure out some creative/brutal way to dispatch of the assholes. He’s basically a more violent version of Kevin McCallister from “Home Alone”. By the way, the brutal thing I mentioned isn’t just a simple “oh, there’s a little bit of violence here”, oh no. This movie is really violent, which means there’s a good amount of blood being spilled in this movie. Just saying that if anyone out there is really squeamish. Me on the other hand… yeah, I had fun.

This movie has been pretty well received. On Rotten Tomatoes it has a 60% postive rating. On Metacritic it has a score of 57/10. And on imdb.com it has a score of 7,2/10.

“The Equalizer” is a flawed but still really solid action-thriller. It has an okay plot, pretty good characters, great performances, great music, and really good directing. My main problem with the movie stems from the plot thing I mentioned earlier in the review. Time for my final score. *Clears throat*. My final score for “The Equalizer” is an 8,99/10. So even though it’s flawed I’d say that it’s worth buying.

My review of “The Equalizer” is now completed.

Based on an old TV-show… okay.