The Equalizer

The Punisher: Hornbach Edition. The better the first half is, which holds back, relies on the characters and has a nice old-school trace, the worse the second is, because it ruins everything. In the second half, Denzel is just an invincible chimera that takes himself too seriously and that makes him an uninteresting character. Literally, the nail in the coffin is footage when, instead of uncompromising gradation, it fades away because of so many endings that even the Return of the King would get up and go home. (30/05/2018)

Well... no. I can appreciate an action flick with higher formal ambitions from time to time, but I also demand that its contents not strongly irritate me, which here unfortunately wasn’t the case. Equalizer looks good, the performances are fine and the sound design is great, but I found it boring and irritating most of the time. Is it exaggerated? Of course, but it doesn’t matter. Is it narratively dumb and disjointed? Yes, unfortunately very much so. And yet it looks so, so good :/ 60% (22/02/2015)

Slower but all the more focused, subtly escalating and with a perfect performance by the main villain. Washington is approaching the position of an A-list Seagal and soon we’ll see a halo lighting up over his head. I was delighted with the character balance between him and Csokas, the dialogue, Bill Pullman’s small role, more blood than we are used to in Washington movies, and the closing music by Moby. Fuqua is back! (14/10/2014)

The Equalizer with Denzel Washington could be pretty much compared to Shooter with Mark Wahlberg, which was also shot by Fuqua, years ago. As far as the action goes, the scenes are very well-done, but the movie has a couple of mediocre, uninteresting and useless moments; it could’ve been 30 minutes shorter and I wouldn’t mind at all. (15/06/2015)

Denzel and dangerous DIY techniques, or also the prequel to Man on Fire, whose only fault is that Fuqua is not Scott. Thus, the slow building of the plot is rather annoyingly long (out of 135 minutes, about 20 minutes are horrendous) and the length of the slow-motion sequences is long beyond absurd. 3 ½. (14/12/2014)