Denzel washington the equalizer tv#
Denzel washington the equalizer mac#

Denzel washington the equalizer tv#

No memories of the 1986 TV series, starring Edward Woodward as McCall, are needed to enjoy this virulently lively thriller. The world against one man that seems fair odds, when Washington is The Man. Every mob in town, Russian and Irish, along with a cordon of cops on the take, wants to kill Mac. That one kind gesture to the teenage Teri triggers his old talents and leads to an epic tangle with Pushkin’s prime enforcer, a purring cobra named Teddy (Martin Csokas, whose death-mask face suggests a more muscular Kevin Spacey). He’s like a bomb, of nuclear thrust, waiting to be detonated.

Denzel washington the equalizer mac#

He has nearly finished The Old Man and the Sea, and the viewer may wonder if Washington, who turns 60 in Dec., is like Hemingway’s Santiago, “too old to hook the big fish.”īut we wouldn’t be invested in Mac - aka Robert McCall, a top government agent living incognito since he “died” decades earlier - if he were to withhold his skills and anger forever. At night he reads alone in his flat or in the diner where he met Teri. The film’s first shot, a labyrinthine backwards track from a view of East Boston through Mac’s obsessively tidy apartment, reveals shelves of the hundred great books and little else. His life is monastic, his emotions post-mortem. When quizzed about previous employment, he says, “I was a Pip,” and mimes, not too convincingly, the dance steps of a Gladys Knight backup singer. His bad luck: the gentleman opposing him is not Barack Obama but Denzel Washington.įor much of this exemplary thriller, written by Richard Wenk, Mac is the quiet, friendly employee at Home Mart, solicitous of his coworkers and protective of his past.

Big of the Russian drug cartel is code-named Pushkin it may as well be Putin. In director Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer, which opens the fall action-film season with a resounding, R-rated bang, the Moscow-based Mr. Not since Rosa Klebb of SMERSH took on James Bond in From Russia With Love a half-century ago has Hollywood been able to revel with cause in the villainy of Eastern European tyrants. Bad as it is for Ukraine, the revived reputation of post-Soviet Russia as the world’s most thuggish aggressor state is a boon for action movies.