Toronto Critic's Pick: Denzel Gives 'Em Hell in 'The Equalizer'

Question: What’s the point of remaking The Equalizer,a dour, by-the-numbers 1980s TV show about a vengeful hitman? Answer: Denzel Washington. The 59-year-old Oscar-winner brings such pure star power, physical grace, and emotional restraint to the character of Robert McCall, you almost forget he’s starring in an updated version of a so-so drama.

In the film, Washington plays a former Black Ops agent who faked his own death, and is now living way too quietly in Boston, working the floor at a Home Mart superstore. His aimless existence is neatly emphasized by director Antoine Fuqua, who last worked with the actor in Training Day. Here, in one coldly lit scene after the next, Fuqua establishes McCall’s loneliness and disconnection.The audience learns so much about the man just by watching McCall silently wash his single plate and knife and fork and fold a tea towel — all with the care of an assassin cleaning his sniper rifle.

But there’s only so much stillness an ex-killer can take, and soon, Washington’s called back into action. At a local diner, he meets a teen prostitute Teri (Chloe Grace Moretz) who dreams of becoming a singer, but who’s now working for a Russian gangster, Teddy (the ferociously handsome Marton Csokas). When a client smacks Teri and she hits the fat slug back, Teddy beats the girl to a pulp for disobedience — and inadvertently lights McCall’s fuse.

Yes, it’s an “Every time I try to get out, they pull me back in” moment. McCall realizes, despite all his good work at Home Mart (he’s such an employee team builder!), that his higher calling is equalizing the score, protecting the weak from the wicked with a series of creative kills.

The Equalizer's biggest flaw is its Neanderthal attitude toward women; it's mortifying to see Kick-Ass star Moretz getting her ass kicked here. While Moretz gamely tries to liven up a flatly written character — striving, it seems, to hit the same notes Jodie Foster did in Taxi Driver — she can’t avoid the character’s role as a mere a plot pawn. Her purpose is to set the vengeance wheels in motion in act one, and then lie with tubes in her arms in a hospital bed for most of acts two and three.

But, for sheer balletic violence — and a rousing, climactic High Noon-like face-off finale — The Equalizer delivers on what Washington and Fuqua promise. It’s a straight shot of testosterone, no chaser. You’ll never enter a hardware store and look at that sledge hammer in aisle three the same way again.