“Blockbuster FRIDAY” The Equalizer IDIL Rating: * * * ½ Stars Cast: Denzel Washington, Marton Csokas, Chloë Grace Moretz, Vladimir Kulich, David Harbour Direction: Antoine Fuqua Genre: Thriller Duration: 2 hours 12 minutes Story: Robert McCall (Washington) is a deceptively soft-spoken former Black Ops operative who now works in a Home Mart store in Boston. He recently lost his wife and now leads a quiet life. His sense of righteousness is very much in place though and when he finds out that his gentle, young friend Teri (Moretz) has been bashed up by her pimp who is in the Russian Mafia, he methodically goes after the entire mob to exact bloody revenge. Review: McCalls pursuit of the Mafia doesnt, ironically, begin with violence. Soon after visiting Teri in hospital, he calmly and boldly walks into the office of her pimp Slavi (Meunier) with an envelope containing $9,800 in exchange for her freedom. Slavi and his men listen to McCalls offer as they slug down tumblers of expensive vodka and sharpen their carved knives. They sneer at him and laugh at the paltry amount. McCall then almost leaves quietly but then he stops at the door, assesses the tense situation and the slick, sick violence that follows would make even a Tarantino proud - especially with the way McCall uses a champagne corkscrew as a weapon. A switch has flipped in McCalls mind and the beast has woken up. Before Slavi bleeds out, he manages a rasp: Who are you? In Moscow, uber-boss Puskhin (Kulich) is infuriated with these developments. He sends his ruthless henchman Teddy (Csokas) to finish McCall but it is actually the Russians who will now have to keep looking over their tattooed shoulders for this deadly Good Samaritan-cum-vigilante. Teddy and McCall finally meet in a restaurant and Teddy realizes, struggling to keep the badass Mafia sneer in place, that McCall will show them no mercy.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 12:55:40 +0000