The Equalizer

Antoine Fuqua’s film reunites him with Denzel Washington thirteen years after Training Day, and it long belonged to other people. Russell Crowe was trying to get it made in 2010, other directors circled the chair, and Washington locked in only late in 2011. The opening third of these one hundred and thirty two minutes is close to actionless. McCall reads at a diner table, turns insomnia into routine, sets his cup in the same spot each time. When violence arrives it is staged as scheduling rather than rage: he checks a stopwatch before a fight and the cut goes to the dial, not the blow. The consequence is clear. If you want kinetic combat this is wrong; if you want to watch method itself, it is exactly right. The hardware store finale was not improvised. Fuqua has described laying it out with former special forces men until planning turned into children in a sandbox. The weapons come off the shelves: nail gun, drill, barbed wire. Filming took place in towns around Boston. Who it’s for: anyone treating that stopwatch check as the real show and waiting out forty near-silent opening minutes. Who it’s not for: viewers who cannot sit through detailed puncture injuries, since the closing twenty minutes are the most explicit stretch.