Films > DVD Reviews

The Equalizer

17/12/14

For those of us too young to remember, The Equalizer was an 80’s American TV show based in New York in which an icy Edwood Woodwood played a retired CIA agent who helped little old ladies, desperate fat useless men, and shoulder-padded, bouffant-bonced  damsels out of sticky situations. Actually, it was pretty good, and deservedly popular, so it’s a minor miracle that it’s taken this long for some idea-starved, Hollywood guff-merchant to green-light a film version.

So, here we have an icy Denzel Washington playing a CIA agent who’s faked his own death, helping a teenaged prostitute and a fat useless man out of a sticky situation by taking on police corruption, refined sugar, and the entire Russian mafia. It all starts very well, developing characters with none-too-subtle literary references and building slowly to the inevitable Slavic ass-kickery. Unfortunately it then runs out of ideas, spending its remaining 90 minutes on a descent into revenge-porn-by-numbers with puerile glee, each heavily-accented anonymous goon being dispatched more gruesomely than the last. This, then, is a very graphic Equalizer.

If that’s your kind of thing, though, then you could do worse. It’s a damn sight more entertaining than watching Liam Neeson capping Arabs to save his snivelling daughter’s hymen for the seventh time, but only because Denzel Washington is as charismatic and watchable as ever. However, if you’re expecting something with the charm and wit of the original series, this will disappoint.