Al's Omniflick: The Equalizer

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

The Equalizer

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: Antoine Fuqua/Starring: Denzel Washington, Marton Czokas, Chloe Grace Moretz, Bill Pullman and Melissa Leo

What is there that Robert McCall, the mysterious habitue of a neighborhood cafe and employee of a home improvement store can't do? He dispenses health tips to his fellow employees, helps train an overweight co-worker for a security guard test and generously offers inspirational, you-can-be-whatever-you-want-to-be advice to a call girl seeking a better life. He lives his life in an orderly manner that would make most obsessive-compulsives shudder. Not enough for you? Well, he also has little patience for the profanity his Home-Mart colleagues utter and chides them for their junk-food intake. The man is so good and straight he urinates holy water.

Oh, and one more thing; he can also thrash (to put it mildly) a room full of Russian underworld slimes who threaten his call girl friend Teri (Chloe Grace Moretz), with a frightening array of martial arts and weapon skills and can repurpose mundane home-improvement merchandise for lethal ends.

Can such a man possibly exist in this world? In this dimension? In director Antoine Fuqua's (Training Day) world, he can.

The Equalizer, Fuqua's monumentally silly action flick, is enjoyable at times but if gritty realism is your thing, then brother (or sister), you've come to the wrong place. It features yet another character so common in multiplexes these days; a seemingly ordinary man who happens to be a former CIA operative; one who has retained his deadly training.

Denzel Washington plays the aforementioned Robert McCall, a man with god-like unflappability who lives alone and leads a life that is deceptively prosaic. He works a shift at Home Mart while his insomniac evenings leads him to his local cafe, where he habitually occupies the same seat and drinks tea made from a teabag he carries on his person. McCall arranges the book he brings along, the silverware and his napkin just right; leaving nothing to casual randomness. His book is The Old Man and the Sea; a selection chosen from a 100-Novels-Everyone-Should-Read list that his former wife worked most of her way through. He chats about Hemingway's novel with Teri, who like McCall, is a cafe regular.

After seeing Teri sitting at the counter on consecutive nights, McCall discovers she is being pimped by a Russian scumbag named Vladimir. Ever the paladin, McCall offers to buy Teri's freedom from Vladimir after he sees her battered face following a beating she suffered at the Russian's hands.

McCall bravely enters Vladimir's office one night to bargain; offering a hefty sum. Vladimir and his minions are naturally contemptuous of McCall and his offer. Before McCall leaves the office, he locks the door then scans Vladimir's men in an almost-scientific manner before unleashing death; sparing no gruesome or sadistic means to accomplish his bloody goal.

McCall's brutal dispatch of Vladimir and his men comes to the attention of their boss, who deploys another heavily tatooed Russian named Teddy (Marton Csokas) to find the man responsible for the carnage. Teddy's specialty is troubleshooting for the underworld overlord and he executes his mission in a psychotically impassive, amoral and vicious manner, suffering no impediments.

The film becomes a cat and mouse game between Teddy and McCall that proceeds in a predictable, mechanical fashion until the preposterous final showdown inside the Home Mart, where Teddy's thugs hold McCall's fellow employees hostage. Once McCall arrives, you can guess the rest.

The one and only scene I found deliriously entertaining was McCall's confrontation with Vladimir and his men. The fact that he actually times the violent bloodletting speaks volumes about his obsession for order. Alas, the rest of the movie is what it is.

I can't account for the casting of Melissa Leo and Bill Pullman, who have brief, thankless and bland roles as McCall's former associates. As talented as Denzel Washington is, he is no stranger to slumming, but this script is even more of a slum-stroll than he's accustomed to. Chloe Grace Moretz's role as the hooker-with-musical-ambitions is as thin as frost while Marton Csokas' tattooed torso probably has more detail than his character description.

As always with films like The Equalizer, absurdities in narrative and character are taken a bit too seriously. The film could have used some of the self-aware silliness we find in The Expendables series.

Hey, at least we finally have a hero who reads books! Why has that never happened before? I guess it's pretty tough to imagine Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzeneggar or Bruce Willis cracking the spine of Don Quixote--one of the other books McCall enjoys in the cafe.

Was I mistaken in believing a sequel was hinted at? Why bother speculating; it's as certain as a sunrise.

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On DVD

Fury (1936)

Director: Fritz Lang

Though we might normally think of the films M and Metropolis when director Fritz Lang becomes the topic of conversation, less known is the legendary director's work in Hollywood. Having fled the ever-growing menace of Nazi Germany for America in the early 1930s', Lang eventually found himself under contract for MGM.

Though his work in Hollywood is very uneven, one standout is Fury, from 1936. Starring Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sydney, the film's condemnation of mob justice seems spectacularly daring now, considering lynching was still a reality in Depression-era America. We don't see one black person in the film entire but we know precisely for whom Lang film is sympathetic.

Spencer Tracy plays Joe Wilson, who is arrested in a small town while en route to meet his fiance, Katherine (Sylvia Sydney). Suspected of being part of a kidnapping of a little girl, Wilson is arrested on the flimsiest evidence. While he sits in cell; angry and indignant, Katherine is puzzled as to why her fiance hasn't arrived at their prearranged meeting place.

But Wilson's fortunes take a darker and more dangerous turn when a mob--already on edge--is roused to anger. Egging one another on, the mob moves on the jailhouse where Wilson is being held. As the angry gathering becomes a mass, drawing citizens of the town into their swelling numbers, a lynch-mob begins to form. The sheriff, determined to see due process take its course, refuses their forceful demands. Becoming angrier and angrier and bolder and bolder, the crowd storms the jail, overwhelming the sheriff and his deputies. Unable to unlock the cell doors to reach Wilson, the mob sets the jailhouse ablaze as an alternate method of lynching.

Katherine, having arrived on the scene, faints when she sees flames engulf the cell where her fiance is held.

In spite of the mob acting as a faceless entity, its principle members are brought to trial though the town and the defendants maintain a conspiracy of silence, hoping to escape convictions and censure.

A sure acquittal seems imminent until damning evidence assures their guilt. When the majority of the members receive death sentences, Wilson turns up at his brothers, having survived the fire. Knowing the public is unaware of his survival, he vows to stay in hiding to ensure the mob conspirators are executed.

The scene where Katherine, nearly insane from grief, comes face to face with Joe is a powerful moment in the film. As she slowly recovers from her state, she realizes Joe's vindictive determination to see the mob hang is in itself a great injustice.

The story climaxes during a stirring courtroom scene that brings the fascinating story to a close.

I would have never expected Hollywood to make a statement as powerful as Fury made in 1936. Given the fact that lynchings in America at the time went unpunished, the movie railed bravely, in spite of the main character being white rather than black, against what was then the status quo. The Oxbow Incident would make a similar and commensurately powerful statement seven years later.

The film's willingness to peer into the darker side of American life could be partly attributed to Lang, who co-wrote the story and who was no stranger to exploring the darker side of humanity. Having seen evil flower in his home country, it makes sense Lang would choose to tell this story.

Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sydney give wonderful, emotionally layered performances. Katherine's near descent into madness is depicted touchingly by Sydney. To see Tracy's mild-mannered Wilson become angry and vengeful is heartbreaking.

Even watching Lang's film on a small screen does little to diminish its power. Weeks after the viewing, I still can't shake its indelible images or its angry indictment of one of America's great crimes. One couldn't devise a better title than one it was given eighty years ago. Fury indeed.