2.5 stars (out of 5)
A remake of the awesomely ‘80s TV series The Equalizer (or shouldn’t that be The Equaliser here? Hey, just sayin’…) has been in the pipeline for years, and here it is, with Denzel Washington replacing Edward Woodward, Antoine Fuqua as director and reams (and reams, and reams) of brutal but pointless violence.
Robert McCall (Denz) is a Bostonian with lots of friends, a nice job at a fake home hardware chain, a bad case of insomnia and a fair few secrets too. In the early hours he frequently takes a seat at a local diner, and it’s here that he meets Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz), an underage prostitute being treated horribly by a bunch of Russian scumbags. They bond over Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man And The Sea (?!?), and when Teri’s later beaten up, Robert is driven to visit her ‘bosses’, a slavering bunch of clichéd bastards, and when they won’t let him buy her freedom they regret it. It turns out that (duh!) Robert has a hidden past and a talent for bashing, terrorising and killing, and after taking on these nasties he turns his attention to corrupt cops, local thieves and more, as all the while a bigtime baddie (OTT Marton Csokas) is on his trail, leading to all sorts of tediously bloodthirsty mayhem.
Fuqua, who directed Washington to his undeserved Oscar for Training Day, makes this far more dragged-out, flashy, PC, vicious and ludicrous than the original series, but that goes without saying (after all, when did blockbuster movie remakes ever have anything much to do with their original sources?). And there’s sure to be a sequel, no matter how dull and objectionable this one might be, so get ready for Denz to return in, say, 2016 for another round of beltings, stabbings, shootings, hammerings, throat-slittings and corkscrewings. Yay.
I Wake Up Screening 