I would compare it to something like Taken, a film which The Equalizer resembles in a number of small but useful ways, we're told enough about Liam Neeson's character that we get to feel like we're right there along with him every step of the way The Equalizer makes it so clear that Washington's character knows more than we do about everything, he almost doesn't feel human. And no matter how many books he's reading whose content oh-so-conveniently maps onto the themes of that part of the story, the film can't cheat its way into making him seem like a real psychological presence for us to cling to. Which does a lot of things, some good (it staves off the exposition dump until a place where it gets to feel natural and implied), and at least one that's not good at all, which is that by defining McCall in terms of the identity that we're not privy to, he's always kept at an enormous emotional remove from the audience. And while it's not very difficult to suss out the general shape, if not all the particular details, of what happened to him before he ended up hiding out in a shabby Boston diner reading books, drinking tea, and acting as a mentor to weary teenage prostitute Alina (Chloƫ Grace Moretz), the film resists confirming even the things we understand pretty early and pretty intuitively until deep, deep into the running time. Washington plays Robert McCall, a man with a mysterious and deliberately cryptic past that we first only know involves a dead wife. And from that point on, there's very little doubt that The Equalizer shall see fit to eschew any thing resembling irony or detachment.
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Within the first minute of the film, there's a shot of a measuring cup full of blueberries for a morning smoothie, shot in an extreme close-up that makes those blueberries look, by God, like the most angry, menacing, intense berries that ever stormed their way off a bush and into a man's belly.
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Denzel Washington plays a man with a very particular set of skills who decides to start pushing back against injustice and exploitation by unflinchingly engaging in acts of bloody, bloody violence well, then, that is all there is to be said on the matter, and that is the movie we will get, for 132 minutes of almost uninterrupted severity.
If nothing else, The Equalizer wins my respect - a form of it, anyway - for how committed it is to being itself.