Peter Suderman Reviews The Equalizer

The Equalizer is expected
to top this weekend’s box office. I
reviewed the movie for The Washington Times: 

Don’t worry if you don’t remember “The Equalizer,” the
late ‘80s TV series on which Denzel Washington’s latest film
is based.

The movie borrows little from the show except a few names and a
basic setup that is intended mostly as a vehicle for righteous
violence.

As in the TV show, a mysterious loner named Robert
McCall (Mr. Washington) stalks city streets, taking down thugs
and bad guys in an effort to help good citizens put-upon by the
crime and corruption of urban life.

He’s got a past, a sense of justice, and a way with knives and
guns.

The movie changes the city setting from New York to Boston,
perhaps out of deference to the Big Apple’s massive drop in street
crime over the last two and a half decades.

But aside from the inclusion of a few cops with Irish accents,
Boston doesn’t have much a presence or personality.

That’s in keeping with the rest of the film. It’s an
appropriately generic urban setting for this thoroughly generic
revenge thriller and its bloody but persistently generic action
thrills.

One of thinking about the movie is as a spiritual successor to
Man on Fire, the 2004 Tony Scott actioner that also
starred Washington. The Equalizer isn’t nearly as
stylistically over-the-top (although from time to time it flirts
with a similarly spastic approach), but it has the same sort of
determined, violent, justice-at-all-costs momentum. There isn’t all
that much drama, really, just a series of increasingly brutal
encounters in which Washington inevitably triumphs, using whatever
is convenient as a weapon. It’s not about the conflict so much as
it is about the catharsis.