The Equalizer
Overview
Robert McCall times everything. His tea, his mornings, the handful of seconds he needs to dismantle a room full of armed men — Denzel Washington plays him as a man whose calm is the scariest thing about him. By day McCall stacks shelves at a Boston hardware store and works through the hundred books his late wife loved. He can't sleep, so he sits in a diner at 2 a.m., and that's where he befriends Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz), a young woman controlled by Russian traffickers. When they put her in a hospital bed, the life he buried comes back out of storage. Antoine Fuqua, who directed Washington to an Oscar in Training Day, keeps the violence short, ugly, and precise — no speeches, just a man reading a room like a blueprint. Marton Csokas shows up as the mob's polished fixer, and the cat-and-mouse between those two is the film's real pleasure, all of it building toward a finale fought through the aisles of that hardware store. It made close to 200 million dollars and gave Washington one of his signature roles. Two sequels followed. Neither caught this one's quiet menace.
