![]() We’re seeing through McCall’s eyes when a Škorpion machine pistol catches the light. Fuqua’s Boston is at times subtly hostile. Robert McCall is a Black man, and his world is lensed by a Black man. None of them are the pinnacle military-shaped white man, and while that archetype haunts this film, it’s imperfectly occupied. The world of The Equalizer is structured on a pernicious “normal,” with McCall helping people we imagine need his help – teenage sex worker, overweight happy guy, middle-aged retail woman. It’s fun, but it requires a dialogue with the lizard part of our brains. For Robert, it’s like a frame of mind, how he maintains composure under a barrage of threats, and even the one-liners are edged by faux concern: “You don’t want to do this,” essentially. And not a scene of action passes without a lecture, regardless the student’s level of consciousness. This is a hero whose primary verb is “harm,” and when it comes to toxic masculinity, the category is “ dad fiction.” The Equalizer movies are some of the daddest of all Robert’s door back into the life is protection of a daughter figure, and in the sequel, it’s revenge for a work wife. It’s very possible to take a cynical read of the film’s virtues, and the action genre isn’t properly assessed without a healthy dose of concern. They choose the hard way, and Washington’s face alone communicates his control of the room such that when he puts a corkscrew through the bottom of a guy’s jaw, we buy it. Here, it’s the gangsters who underestimate this old man making a simple offer: cash for the girl’s freedom. It’s the moments of silence before a Sergio Leone gunfight or a King Hu martial-arts battle. We tour these spaces ahead of time to set the scene, which is essential in an action movie. After his friend and sex worker Alina ( Chloë Grace Moretz) is hospitalized by members of a gang, he tracks the perpetrators to the backroom of an upscale restaurant, one with valet parking and golden, gilded architectural flourishes. We go inside Robert’s head, and this first happens at around the 30-minute mark of the first film, to stage the first action scene. If the Equalizer movies have any sort of gimmick, it’s that Washington’s character Robert McCall has the video game-like ability to super-focus, in which time slows down for close-ups on weapons and opponents’ tattoos. His many collaborations with Tony Scott proved fruitful, producing cult classics like Man on Fire and the underrated Taking of Pelham 123 remake. This is a space where Denzel Washington felt natural, maybe holding a pistol on the poster, but in the story using his wits to avert disaster. Instead, the era came to be defined by the action/thriller, with a decreased role for the aesthetics of action in favor of a more general intensity: global stakes, post-9/11 geopolitics, the dreaded shaky cam. The 2000s were a murky time for the American action movie, which was beginning to reject the creeping Hong Kong influence that would go on to help Southeast Asian markets – and without direct involvement from key personnel (see: Fuqua’s The Replacement Killers). The film adaptation would be a reunion of Washington and director Antoine Fuqua, whose previous collaboration in Training Day won the former an Oscar, but also promised something just as urgently needed: clarity. Indeed, The Equalizer was based on a TV show of the same name from 1985, about an ex-agent applying professional skills to do-gooder vigilantism. In 2014, Washington headlined an action vehicle that felt like a throwback to the street-level brawlers of the '80s. He may not be the first name that comes to mind, but Denzel Washington is absolutely an action hero – and a damn good one. In retrospect, The Equalizer films appear less as an amusing diversion in an otherwise upright filmography than the logical resolution to an area of exploration. And yet, he’s about to bookend an action trilogy of his very own, one convincingly built around an action star. When Sylvester Stallone is drafting his shortlist – Schwarzenegger, Lundgren, Statham, Li, Van Damme – would an Oscar winner like Denzel Washington ever be considered? Sure, he’s never headlined a series of supermarket DVDs with interchangeable titles, doesn’t embody a particular style of fighting, and most importantly, he already has a niche: A-list actor. Instead, the equivalent awards body for the action world is, say, the Expendables series, and only so many make the cut. This is the Hollywood binary that prevents an Academy Award for stunts and determines that no amount of fight choreography ever adds up to a performance. There are Oscar winners and there are action stars.
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