Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Unfortunately, the cinema landscape is rather slim pickings at the moment thanks to that familiar lull between the summer blockbuster season and the stacked schedule leading up to Christmas.
It’s a time when Hollywood offers the centre stage to their budget offerings before unleashing the big guns. Based on a recommendation from a friend (I know you read this column; your recommendation was bad and I hope you feel bad), I set out to watch The Equaliser with high hopes that it would be a diamond in the rough.
It wasn’t. It was another bland by-the-numbers effort we have seen many times before in an already bloated genre.
The establishment of the movie’s plot doesn’t bode well for what’s to follow. Hardly the beacon of originality, Robert McCall (Washington) is a retired government secret agent living in a normal home, working a normal job at a hardware store, and generally doing normal things to escape his past since he promised his recently-deceased wife that the spy shenanigans would stop.
However, the allure of pacifism is soon shattered when his teenage friend Teri (Moretz), a waitress at a local diner, is viciously beaten by a small-time mobster for the Russian Mafia. McCall decides to take action under his ‘Equaliser’ vigilante guise, killing the baddie and his men in brutally efficient fashion.
This sets off a globetrotting series of events as the higher-ups get involved and dispatch men to take out McCall, the meanest of which is the imposing enforcer, Teddy (Csokas).
If you feel like you’ve already seen this movie before you even set foot in the cineplex, I wouldn’t blame you. A former secret agent sets out for revenge against an Eastern European syndicate after a female close to him, who has aspirations of being a pop singer, is assaulted and forced to get involved in a certain ‘industry’.
Yep, the parallels are so damning that they’re borderline plagiarism. Ever since Taken came straight out of left field and became a smash success, many studios have attempted to replicate it, to almost universal failure. Thus, therein lies this film’s greatest disappointment. It’s just another copycat thriller with no innovation.
A late-blooming career U-turn into a badass action hero is all the rage these days since Taken revitalised an aging Liam Neeson (who is a frankly ridiculous 62- year-old) into a no-nonsense, loveable-yet-brutal killer. Heck, it was only last month that Pierce Brosnan slipped back into his 007 mojo for the uninspired November Man.
Washington, a few months shy of the big 60, is the latest to try his hand at career reinvigoration by way of breaking bones and slicing veins. Unfortunately, no one can Neeson quite like…well, Neeson, and this is reflected in the shoddy action scenes.
To disguise the evident lack of mobility in his lead actor, director Antoine Fuqua fluctuates between fast cuts, blurry editing, rapid camera angle changes and silly overuse of slow motion. There are very few shots that seem to be in normal time, leaving brawls looking entirely unrealistic and the viewer wondering what on earth is going on.
It goes something like: McCall enters room, cue a blur of limbs and blades, then a heap of bad guys lying lifeless on the floor with their conqueror displaying a look of ‘did you just see that?’ Well, not really mate, no.
Annoyingly, the villains are too cartoony to take seriously. Teddy never misses an opportunity to sneer (or look constipated, it’s hard to tell which) at anyone and everything, alongside committing any dirty deed he can find in the book of Villainy 101. Unnecessarily bribing a dirty cop? Check. Randomly strangling one of his underlings for no reason in particular? Check.
The scriptwriters could have significantly trimmed the films bloated length and improved it on the whole by removing these scenes and incorporating some subtly or even mystery with the Mafia goons, but alas that is clearly asking for too much.
As you may have gathered by this scathing critique, I took very few positives from my experience (I hope you’re still reading, ‘friend’ of mine!), but Moretz (i.e. ‘the girl from Kick-Ass’) stole the show with a more than solid performance that continues to cement her as one of the brightest upcoming Hollywood starlets. It’s a shame that she managed to accumulate such little screen time in a movie that soars past the two hour mark, but that’s sadly indicative of the other poor choices the director made.
Alas, since it’s my job to be honest with you and my editor would not appreciate a line of angry cinema-goers brandishing pitchforks outside the GulfWeekly office, I can only heartily recommend dusting off that old Taken DVD instead of watching this movie.
In fact, the trailer for Tak3n was released just a few days ago. The assortment of clips it contains in just two minutes is more exciting and probably a more coherent film than anything you’ll find in this mind-numbing and interminable experience. Do not go and see this, and certainly don’t be as harsh as to encourage your pals to see it. I’m starting to think that was a prank.
* Showing in Cineco, Seef I, Seef II, Saar Cineplex, Al Jazeera Cineplex
