- #Denzel washington the equalizer movie
- #Denzel washington the equalizer series
- #Denzel washington the equalizer tv
#Denzel washington the equalizer movie
Then it would be some other kind of movie and not this one, where Teri/Ilena’s overly tattooed and ludicrously coiffed pimp (David Meunier) finally runs afoul of McCall by roughing her up one too many times. Honestly, I’d have been just fine if “The Equalizer” never abandoned its brooding, late-night Wong Kar-wai-does-Edward Hopper mode. When we first meet him he’s reading “The Old Man and the Sea,” and by the end of the film he’s gone through “Don Quixote” to “Invisible Man,” and I suppose those function as narrative cues. Robert barely sleeps and spends his nights at a 24-hour diner, drinking tea, working his way through a list of classic literature and making small talk with a Russian hooker who calls herself Teri, or sometimes Ilena (Chloë Grace Moretz). Well, OK, we can tell that because we showed up to see an action movie called “The Equalizer,” which for almost half an hour has no action in it whatever. Penney.) But we can tell that something about the guy doesn’t fit. (Only Washington could look this good, at this age, in a wardrobe purchased off the rack at J.C. His character, Robert McCall, lives alone, dresses in conservative American-guy drag – button-down shirts and relaxed-fit slacks – and spends his workdays pushing a dolly around inside a Home Depot-like big-box store in Boston. Washington will turn 60 later this year, and Fuqua makes him look grayer and older than ever before, subtly but noticeably diminished in scale from the superstar of 15 or 20 year ago. (Both “The Equalizer” and “Training Day” were shot by master cinematographer Mauro Fiore.) It might be a cliché to suggest that an African-American filmmaker like Fuqua sees the star’s visage in a different light, but there’s no question that in their two movies together Fuqua has homed in on Washington’s face with a ruthless intensity.
Every director who’s ever worked with Washington, black or white, has taken advantage of his unusual combination of good looks and inwardness, his slightly standoffish demeanor, that sense that he’s carrying things around that we should not presume to try to understand. What isn’t formulaic is the persistent David Fincher mood of nightmare – the sense that we’re in an imaginary universe related to our own, but not quite the same – and the iconic stillness and loneliness of Denzel Washington.
#Denzel washington the equalizer series
If you skip it, you’re missing one of the year’s signal works of superior Hollywood craftsmanship.įuqua builds considerable suspense from the near-silent opening scenes onward, and then delivers a series of grotesque and imaginative killings, all in entirely formulaic fashion. If you decide to go, don’t claim you weren’t warned. “The Equalizer” is gripping, mysterious and even sometimes moving, but it’s never pleasant, still less fun. It’s not quite that I think this movie is a guilty pleasure, since “pleasure” is hardly the applicable term. If that sounds like I’m recommending “The Equalizer” and then trying to take it back, that’s exactly right. This is an entirely different kind of movie than “Training Day,” and far less ambitious in narrative terms, but it’s a triumph in its own brooding, ultraviolent and faux-meaningful fashion.
#Denzel washington the equalizer tv
Now the Washington-Fuqua duo is back together for “The Equalizer,” a synthetic blend of sentimental fantasy and Nietzschean supercop-revenge saga based on the all-but-forgotten 1980s TV series with British star Edward Woodward. (I had totally forgotten that Fuqua directed a King Arthur film starring Clive Owen, and there’s a reason for that.) Fuqua is a master manipulator of style and atmosphere who has often chosen (or gotten stuck with) mediocre material or worse: I have a soft spot for his back-to-basics cop opera “Brooklyn’s Finest,” but his best movie since “Training Day” is probably “Shooter,” with Mark Wahlberg. Washington remains an A-list star, but has made a series of largely forgettable action vehicles and inspirational sagas his best two roles of the last decade have come in Spike Lee’s “Inside Man” and Robert Zemeckis’ “Flight,” but only the first of those stands up to more than one viewing. It took more than a dozen years for Denzel Washington to reunite with Antoine Fuqua, the director who pushed him into startling new territory as the dirty-cop antihero of “Training Day.” Neither man, one could argue, has been quite the same since.
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