I have just got in from watching The Equaliser. There are probably going to be spoilers in here so if you think you might watch it and yet don’t want to know any more than the trailer tells you then feel free to pop back another time.
Overall I rated this film a 6. As with all my ratings you need to refer to this previous communication.
I rated The Equalizer (2014) 6/10 #IMDb http://t.co/HP54k6Ip7o
— Ian Parish (@iparish) September 27, 2014
I enjoyed this film. It’s hard not to like a film that opens with warnings of graphic violence on the ratings certificate. I often remember a friend saying
It’s good to see a proper 18 film now and then
this may have been in reference to Ong Bak.
The Equaliser:
A good action movie. The opening was pretty good and set the mood. I liked the slow pace of it. The problem was that the initial killing sequence was over the top and from there the only place to go was to make it more “involved” and more elaborate deaths.
I kept trying to remember the TV series I watched with my dad. I’ve a feeling there were adverts so it may have been on ITV (shock, horror). Edward Woodward played a man with a mysterious past who helped people in trouble. He would do so in a menacing way and with lots of guns, did he have a secret wardrobe full of weapons? I’m pretty sure that he was rather low-key and sinister in that English way.
In this film version there wasn’t any real subtlety. The first killing was five men brutally executed after a slight altercation about nearly $10,000. Oh, and it turns out these people were key players in the Russian mob. After that the Equaliser can only go on and root out all evil that plagues modern Boston and Russia.
There wasn’t a need to make this a nasty, violent film. It would have been better if the first story in this inevitable franchise was a low key story of a man helping those in his neighbourhood. It could have been a slow-burner of a film and then about three into the series we could have had the decimation of all the mobs running the East Coast.
This film, while enjoyable, missed the point of the Equaliser and I think they also missed a trick. It could have been better.