I Watch Films: The Equalizer (2014)

 

The Equalizer (2014)

Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) works in a DIY store (a big box home improvement store as Americans call it) in Boston, helping his friend Ralphie qualify for a security guard position*. Unable to sleep at night he goes to an all night diner where he sets up his table as he likes it, makes himself a cup of tea and reads a book. This is related to his deceased wife who had a list of 100 books to read before you die, which she never finished.

Another regular at the diner is sex worker Teri; one night she tells McCall that she wants to be a singer and gives him a CD of her singing**, also her real name is Alina. Later, walking, her pimp Slavi turns up, hits her and picks her up in a car, giving McCall a card for his escort agency. She ends up in hospital.

McCall decides this is unfair and goes to try and equalize the situation. He goes to the restaurant Slavi works out of and offers money for her freedom. While the discussion goes on he takes careful note of the men, objects and furniture, counting seconds. When Slavi refuses he kills all the men and walks out.

This sends ripples up the chain of a Russian organised crime syndicate run by oligarch Vladimir Pushkin, as Boston is a key part of his international shipping operation. He sends an enforcer Teddy Rensen. Some of Boston police are on the Russian gangsters payroll; with them reluctantly on his side he beats an Irish gangster. Meanwhile McCall finds himself having to take more active, equalizin’ roles; Ralphie’s family restaurant is burned out, and they’ve been paying protection money to corrupt cops, so he violently blackmails them to return all the money, and he goes after an armed robber who stole the ring of another coworker at the store.

Eventually Teddy figures out that a friend of Alina’s is lying and goes to McCall’s apartment, warning him off, though he hasn’t figured out that McCall is behind all this yet. McCall goes to Susan Plummer, an old intelligence agency friend and learns that Teddy used to be a special forces soldier before going into intelligence work, and then the private sector. It’s like he’s a dark mirror of McCall, a shattered reflection etc. He’s killed two Boston police and another is missing. Unable to officially help, she gives him enough information to track down the missing police officer and McCall finesses the situation by killing all the gangsters at a money-laundering operation of Pushkin’s and leaving the police officer there when back up comes, so his only chance to survive is to use what he knows against the Russians.

McCall then suggests that Teddy back off (using Teddy's old name). Teddy of course doesn’t, leading to the final violent confrontation.

McCall mostly doesn’t use weapons, or rather he uses supplies from the store and improvises using items in the environment. Indeed he prevails on more than one occasion by being able to walk in unarmed, and therefore appears not to be a threat. This however does work against his attempts at a negotiated resolution. These violent men, used to getting their own way through threats, don’t take this quiet voiced middle-aged man seriously. Or is that McCall’s whole plan? Did he quietly want to do some equalizin’ on the side? Is it better than the quiet grieving retirement he's chosen for himself? Anyway a good vigilante action film.

Watch This: Some bad guys get equalized in some good action scenes
Don’t Watch This: It’s inevitable violence escalating to still more inevitable violence
In Addition: During the hiatus of the film series between The Equalizer 2 and The Equalizer 3 they made a new TV series with Queen Latifah as Robin McCall

* Some of his colleagues do wonder what he did before he worked here, clearly sensing he has a past. He tells them he was a Pip, no, not a pimp, a Pip as in Gladys Knight And The Pips. I’m fairly sure this is a lie, or as the intelligence community might call it, a cover story or legend.

** So maybe he’s used the Pips line here too? Washington and presumably McCall are too young to have been members during the classic period of Gladys Knight and the Pips, Washington at university until 1977 when they split from Motown, McCall probably in the Marine Corps. I don’t think we get to hear Alina’s song