The Equalizer

Because he's handsome and charismatic, Denzel Washington is clearly a star, but it's a lot more fun to watch him when he's called upon to act.

In updating the (somewhat obscure) 1980s TV series The Equalizer, director Antoine Fuqua doesn't have to work too hard to get Washington to look imposing. Having helmed movies like Shooter and Bait, he's an old hand at setting up action scenes. He's also the director who guided Washington to his second Oscar for playing an incorrigible cop in Training Day.

If Fuqua had asked his leading man to deliver a character as colorful as he did in their previous collaboration, The Equalizer could have been more than a simple exercise in explosions and gunplay. Instead, Washington is stuck with a role that Arnold Schwarzenegger could have played. Sadly, there's little of the sense of fun that Ah-nold brought with him.

Washington tries to bring some traces of humanity to Robert McCall, the manager of a Home Depot-like building supply store in Boston who seems just a little too old and overqualified to be working a midlevel job in retail. McCall doesn't have to worry about getting up for work because he's a chronic insomniac. He spends his evenings in a 24-hour diner reading literary classics and keeping an eye on a teen prostitute named Teri (Chloe Grace Moretz), who'd obviously rather be singing for a living than turning tricks.

When her Russian mob-backed "escort service" beats her within an inch of her life, McCall tries to buy her freedom. The pimps make the mistake of saying "Nyet," only to discover that McCall also refuses to take no for an answer.

Having unknowingly shut down all of the Russian mob's activities in Beantown, McCall has inadvertently summoned a fearsome enforcer known on the street as Teddy (New Zealand-born actor Marton Csokas, The Lord of the Rings). Teddy sports a body full of menacing tattoos and has a gift for pounding, strangling and stabbing antagonists without staining his sleek, expensive suits.

Csokas achieves an ideal blend of urbane charm and remorseless sadism, so it's easy to wait for Washington to do him in. It would have been even more enjoyable if Washington had been given an equally vivid character.

McCall has a minimal back story and some interesting obsessive-compulsive quirks that Fuqua shoots with a darting camera and edits with a buzz saw. Except for the insomnia, he's little more than a homicidal MacGyver, turning ordinary tools into WMDs.

Because Fuqua approaches Richard Wenk's (The Expendables 2) script with a somber earnestness, it's hard not to snicker as McCall casually strolls away from blasts that would destroy major cities. Because McCall isn't a superhero (that we know of), one wonders what would have happened if Fuqua had taken a lighter approach. The Equalizer certainly wouldn't have been as pompous and dull.

At a bladder-busting 131 minutes, The Equalizer lumbers from point to point, often taking minutes deliver what better movies reveal in seconds. A scene in which McCall delivers a summary of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea to Teri over coffee points to the missed opportunity here. There's suspense and vitality in Hemingway's fishing story, and Washington's expressive tenor would have been the perfect vessel to bring it to a new audience.

MovieStyle on 09/26/2014