His co-stars don’t fare quite as well: Moretz, as we hinted earlier, would get carded at any club she tried to enter, while Csokas fluctuates wildly between controlled menace and over-the-top Bondian super-villainy. Washington can play this role in his sleep, and it’s a credit to his talent that he’s still hard to resist even if he is literally just walking through a lot of the movie. Washington and Fuqua last teamed on Training Day, a much more complex film, and while Fuqua can stage his action scenes effectively and even stylishly (although some of them are a bit too underlit for my taste), he doesn’t bring anything new to the table. But even watching Washington in full warrior mode can’t quite save the proceedings from their by-the-numbers progression. He’s essentially playing a superhero, although Marvel would never let Iron Man or Captain America wallow in the hard-R gore and sadism that McCall generates, most salaciously in an extended battle at Home Mart during which our man uses every power tool at his disposal to bloodily dismantle his opponents (I hope he at least got the employee discount when he paid for it all the next day). No matter how many Russians show up, McCall always comes out on top, and it’s Washington’s impassive yet still undeniably charismatic screen persona that gets the viewer through the increasingly dreary carnage. This is all about getting to the stuff people are paying for, even if it takes a while for Wenk and director Antoine Fuqua to get there: McCall laying waste to an office full of Russian gangsters, McCall taking out a pair of sleazy, corrupt cops, and finally McCall taking on even more Russians, who come out of the woodwork like ants, without even breaking a sweat. Wenk does the same with supporting characters after she is hospitalized, Moretz disappears for almost the rest of the movie, while a Home Mart employee (Johnny Skourtis) whom McCall helps ace the test for security guard also pops conveniently in and out only when needed. The Equalizer could almost fit into Neeson’s recent run of generic action thrillers by virtue of Richard Wenk’s screenplay, which sets up a few potentially interesting ideas (like the OCD thing) and then just as quickly discards them. But the Washington model has the same nasty skill set as Woodward when it comes to dispatching bad guys - a lethal talent that seems to be peculiar to men in their late 50s and early 60s, as Liam Neeson can also attest. And did I tell you that the new one has OCD? That’s why he opens and closes a door several times and arranges his tableware just so every night before having tea. The TV Equalizer drove a Jag this one takes a bus. He’s a widower while Woodward’s McCall was divorced, and he has no children (at least as far as we know) while Woodward had a son who wanted to get into his line of work as well. Marcus Dante (Tory Kittles), Robyn is able to save the day and take down an Elon Musk-style tech bro in the process.The movie’s version of McCall is in some ways less complicated that the TV edition personified by Edward Woodward for four seasons. With help from old Army colleague Melody Bayani (Liza Lapira) and her hacker husband Harry Keshegian (Adam Goldberg), as well as a seemingly sympathetic cop, Det. Thanks to some dialogue from Robyn’s old CIA buddy William Bishop (Chris Noth), who tries to lure her back to the Agency, we know that she’s the right person for the job, and a slightly over-edited fight scene later confirms it. See, Robyn, after being steered off the wrong tracks into the Army and then into a career of hush-hush spec ops wetwork, has recently retired from a position at the head of a global non-profit to spend more time with her incredibly difficult 14-year-old Delilah (Laya DeLeon Hayes), who has been raised mostly by her Aunt Vi (Lorraine Toussaint) and isn’t about to let Robyn forget it.īut the first order of business in The Equalizer episode 1 is establishing Robyn’s badass bonafides by embroiling her in the case of a waitress who accidentally witnesses a professional killing and suddenly finds herself, thanks to some highly advanced CCTV trickery, framed for the crime. It certainly helps that Robyn McCall is played by Queen Latifah with an air of weathered gravitas that is quite similar to what Washington brought to the role and a great fit for the domestic drama that is shackled to the procedural vigilantism.
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