Dir: Antoine Fuqua
Year: 2014
Cast: Denzel Washington, Chloe Grace Moretz
Genre: Action/Thriller/Crime
Cert: 15
Well it seems Antoine Fuqua has dropped the ball yet again... After embarrassing the viewers and himself by making Olympus Has Fallen last year, he returns to the over the top action world with his inaccurate rendition of the popular crime series, The Equalizer.
It follows the usually reliable, Denzel Washington as Robert "Bob" McCall, a quiet, OCD man who has a seemingly shady past. He spends his days accurately timed and scheduled working in a supermarket and usually finishes his late nights in a diner where he reads. One night, a teenage hooker named Teri, played by Chloe Grace Moretz, is brutally beaten by her Russian pimp, Slavi. Since Bob and Teri have become friends, he gets a brutal revenge on the pimp and his comrades, which results in the Russian mafia tracking him down and trying to kill him.
It's a tired premise that could have been woken up with a bit of grit and brutal realism. In the first 20 mins he slaughters Slavi and the lads but after that, starts doing these night time assaults on other people, or I should say "equalizing" the damages... which in Bob's mind getting equal for stealing someone's ring is smashing their head in with a lump hammer. These extra moments of revenge are seriously out of place, they should be leading up to this major assault on the Russians, rather than after when he really should be laying low. I get the whole idea of him being someone who makes things right but it doesn't have that feeling whatsoever, it's just him reading books and essentially recreating Taken. They more than likely made this film after people were reminded of the TV series in The Wolf of Wall Street, because this is entirely different. It's blatantly just a marketing opportunity.
I was with the film for maybe half an hour before I was just idly watching it, not taking any of it in because it was so fucking BORING. It suffers from a bad case of "We think the audience is a gang of spastics" and just stuffs your face with exposition. It also infuriatingly has Russian people talking to other Russian people in fucking English! Why do films continue to do this?? It's a film aimed at an adult audience, why dumb it down so much? We can read!
Antoine Fuckwad brings back more of his dogshit CGI explosions for this too, with probably the most laughably cliched explosion in years. It was like a parody and it was COMPLETELY out of place with the film and actually didn't make any sense. This film begins like it MIGHT be a dark thriller and just becomes a shitty unoriginal action film. If I hadn't seen this for free and crammed with beers, I would be absolutely furious. It's incredibly overlong too, for the kind of movie it is, it shouldn't be more than 100 mins. This clocks in at 131 mins, which might not seem long for many, but it was so tedious that it felt like 331 mins.
I really don't know what happened to Fuckwad (I will actually only refer to him as this from now on) - He directed Training Day, one of the best crime films of the last 15 years, Shooter, an entertaining actioner, & then went back to the Training Day roots with the brilliant, but not near as good, Brooklyn's Finest. He then went absolutely off the rails by making one of the worst action films in years, Olympus Has Fallen, which really should have steered me away from this fucking garbage but when he got Denzel on board, my hopes were heightened. Alas, he just made another piece of shit, not as shit as OHF mind you, but pretty fucking bad.
Stuff I liked: Some OKAY violence in it, it's all very muddled and very clearly badly edited for censorship. Not sure if Ireland was affected but it wasn't violent enough to be cut down from what I could tell so maybe it was already cut. But it did feature a corkscrew being used as knuckle dusters, a power drill to the skull and a nice brutal use of an exhaust pipe and a garden hose.
Some clever uses of everyday items as weapons and it was at least creative in that sense.
It had a maybe 2 or 3 nice shots.
A brilliant soundtrack that was improperly used... I'll get to that in the next bit.
Stuff I didn't like: It had the same issues with Olympus Has Fallen where fucking everything was in the dark so you can barely make out what's going on, stop doing this Fuckwad!
The music as I mentioned above, was used so badly in this. It featured what I could possibly call my all time favourite soul song, Midnight Train To Georgia by Gladys Knight & The Pips, being played on a PA system to distract some henchmen, it was briefly mentioned earlier in the film so it's meant to be a funny little nod... it's not fucking funny, it's stupid and overdone in films. The fact he would go out of his way to do this just pissed me off. Daft!
Denzel was invincible - I was in no way worried for his safety, which is poison for a thriller... This helped me in watching it so idly.
Exposition and English speaking Russians - I mentioned it above but I had to again, fucking stupid!
The whole film was just a shambles. David Ayer has kinda had a rough streak since Training Day too but not of this calibre. At LEAST Sabotage was extremely violent and somewhat entertaining... End of Watch too was good despite it's problems and The Fury looks great! Fuckwad is really letting himself down, he's dragging Denzel with him. He needs to either watch Training Day again and remind himself of what he was or just give up altogether. The latter seems like the best bet I think.
This film only really gets 2 stars off me because I enjoyed it for an embarrassingly low amount of time and it had some good violence ideas... other than that, it was utterly bollocks. I do not recommend this at all!
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