The Equalizer and Jimi: All Is by My Side

You know you’re
in for some stylish mayhem when Robert McCall, the deceptively
mild-mannered hero of Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer, rams
a wine-bottle corkscrew up into the throat of a deserving creep and
you see its curlicue tip wiggling around inside the man’s screaming
mouth. Yikes. And there’s more – much more – where that came
from.

Reuniting with Denzel Washington, who won an Oscar for his
performance in Fuqua’s 2001 Training Day, the director
does a slick job of updating a 1980s TV series for a nastier age.
Unusually for an action film, the story gets underway at a calm,
measured pace. We see that Washington’s McCall lives in monastic
solitude in his Boston apartment, takes the subway to his
lumber-humping job at a Home Depot-like warehouse (where the
younger workers call him “Pops”), and spends his evenings quietly
reading high-toned novels at a local diner. There he engages in
paternal banter with a young prostitute named Teri (Chloë Grace
Moretz), who stops by for time-outs between tricks. But when a
beating by Teri’s pimp puts her in the hospital, we learn that
McCall also has an unexpected talent for meting out savage
retribution.

Because he’s actually a one-time CIA agent, wearied by the many
bad things he was called upon to do for the Agency and now retired
after the death of his wife. Seeking revenge for Teri, he finds
himself confronting the city’s Russian mob. This is bad news for
them, as we see when McCall turns up at their headquarters and
terminates several of them in a scene of spectacular violence. When
word of this bloody wipeout reaches the gang’s chieftain back in
Moscow, a scary enforcer named Teddy (Marton Csokas) is dispatched
to set things right by any means necessary. Although McCall is
additionally preoccupied administering beat-downs to corrupt cops
in league with the Russkis, he’s ready for this lethal emissary,
marshalling an array of surprises that ranges from high-tech
surveillance gadgetry to knives and bombs and power drills.

Fuqua gives free rein to his gift for grisly carnage, but he
balances it with humor (skipping the details of one skirmish in
favor of a shot showing McCall simply wiping blood off a huge
mallet) and with scenes establishing McCall’s gentle concern for
the story’s underdogs – helping a chubby coworker sweat off weight
in pursuit of a security-guard position, and coming to the aid of a
restaurant owner plagued by vicious extortionists. Washington, with
his charismatic gravity and flashing anger, naturally dominates the
movie. But he gets memorable support from the rest of the cast,
especially Haley Bennett, in a moving performance as another
prostitute; Melissa Leo as McCall’s old CIA colleague; and – in
particular – Csokas, whose sadistic Teddy, with his cold eyes and
menacing sneer, is terrifically despicable. (“A sociopath with a
business card,” one character calls him.)

The movie could have been trimmed back from its two-hour-plus
runtime (a long stalk through McCall’s warehouse workplace seems
endless), but that’s a quibble. The picture is a persuasive opening
bid for a franchise (at the end we see McCall setting up a means to
make regular use of his alarming skills, which is basically the
point at which the old TV series began). Unsurprisingly,
Equalizer 2 is already in the works.  

Jimi: All Is by My Side

From
its awful title (the Jimi was only recently tacked on) to
its odd premise (telling the Jimi Hendrix story without any of
Hendrix’s trailblazing music), John Ridley’s new biopic, which has
been screening for more than a year on the festival circuit, would
seem to have the key ingredients of a fiasco. That it’s not is a
major surprise. And the central reason it’s not is André Benjamin, who
channels the late guitarist’s sweet, spacey persona with
spellbinding precision.

Ridley, a writer best-known for scripting 12 Years a
Slave, knew from the start that he’d be unlikely to secure
music rights from the Hendrix estate, which is controlled by Jimi’s
sister, the intransigently protective Janie Hendrix. An earlier
attempt to make a Hendrix movie – with Paul Greengrass directing
and Anthony Mackie in the title role – crumbled after hitting this
wall in 2010. So Ridley didn’t even bother asking.

But Ridley’s story is smaller-scale. It deals with just two
years in Hendrix’s life: 1966, when he was lifted out of smalltime
scuffling in the clubs of Greenwich Village and transported to
England to dazzle a more appreciative audience; and 1967, when he
began his rise to stardom and got picked (by Paul McCartney) to
return to the States and play the final night of the epochal
Monterey International Pop Festival, the site of his legendary
breakthrough. 

Apart from its carefully delimited structure, the movie is also
unusual in its substantial focus on two women who played
significant roles in Hendrix’s life. One of them, Linda Keith
(Imogen Poots), was an expatriate British model who discovered
Hendrix in a New York club, introduced him to LSD, counseled him to
start singing onstage (he hated his voice), and set out to find him
a manager. Keith talked Jimi up to Animals bassist Chas Chandler
(Andrew Buckley), who was tired of touring and was looking to get
into management. But Chandler – one of the few heroes on the
business side of the Hendrix saga – had limited finances, and so
felt compelled to bring in a partner, Animals manager Michael
Jeffrey (Burn Gorman), a very dark figure in Jimi’s life.

The other woman was Kathy Etchingham (Hayley Atwell), a London
scene-maker who fell in love with Hendrix, took him shopping on
Carnaby Street (we see him purchasing his iconic gold-braided
commodore’s jacket there), and also, according to the movie,
serving as his occasional punching bag. (The real Kathy Etchingham
has been insistently vocal in condemning this portrayal of their
relationship as a lie.)

Also inserted into the story is a groupie named Ida (Ruth
Negga). This character is based on Devon Wilson, another Hendrix
love interest from a later period in his life. Ridley has said he
shoehorned her into the man’s earlier years here in order to
provide Hendrix with a “girlfriend of color.”

Poots and Atwell bring a warm glow to their characters, and
they’re given a couple of opportunities to shine. Atwell navigates
a number of vivid emotional states with star-quality ease, and
Poots has one especially affecting scene in which Hendrix quietly
tells Linda that he’s written a song for her. With a melancholy
smile, she notes that a previous boyfriend, Rolling Stone Keith
Richards, also wrote her a song – “Ruby Tuesday.” “All these men
writing songs to me,” she says. “Then I go home and I listen to
them alone.”

The fact that Benjamin (OutKast’s “André 3000”) manages to
center the movie playing such an essentially woozy character as
Hendrix is an impressive achievement. He captures the man’s
fluttery
naïveté with great charm, and he never sounds like a complete
bubblehead, even when rambling on about “negative vibrations” and
“our space brothers,” or saying things like, “When the power of
love takes over the love of power, that’s when things’ll
change.”

It’s a shame he’s not starring in a movie of broader scale and
larger ambitions. Because this one, despite its honorable
intentions, is a mess in several crucial ways. The editing is
remarkably haphazard, with awkward cutaways to trivial details and
discontinuous interludes; the cinematography is strangely
soft-focus; and the music really is a problem. Benjamin is a champ
at guitar-miming, but all we ever hear are cover versions of period
songs that Hendrix was known to play (veteran LA session guitarist
Waddy Wachtel provided the sub-Hendrix leads).

The most successful scene is a replication of a famous London
concert in which Hendrix kicked off with a hastily slapped-together
rendition of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” But another
scene, in which Hendrix gets up onstage to jam with Eric Clapton’s
Cream, is soul-drainingly limp. And when he enters a recording
studio for the first time, we only see him approaching the
microphone. When we don’t hear him playing “Hey Joe” (his first
hit) or any of the songs that later appeared on his game-changing
debut album, Are You Experienced?, it’s hard to fend off a
sense of deep disappointment.

The movie ends at Heathrow Airport, with Hendrix and Noel
Redding (Oliver Bennett) and Mitch Mitchell (Tom Dunlea), his
bandmates in the Jimi Hendrix Experience, preparing to board a
flight to California for the big Monterey gig. The worldwide renown
that followed that appearance would of course make a great movie.
This one, for all of its small pleasures, leaves us still waiting
to see it.