Disciplinarian vigilante gets baggy injustice

The first fifth or so of The Equalizer is an exhaustive introduction to a mysterious protagonist. Bob (Denzel Washington) is a middle-aged widower who works at a Boston big box building supply store. Though he volunteers to coach a co-worker through a weight-loss regimen, Bob has no close friends. No one knows much about him or his past, though Bob claims to have once been one of Gladys Knight’s Pips. Bob seems like a square, lives like a monk, and, while his public persona seems laid back, he takes an almost autistic approach to discipline, timing everything he does with a stopwatch, scrubbing his sneakers daily, and carefully wrapping his own teabag in a pristine napkin before going to the local diner where he spends his sleepless nights reading Hemingway, Cervantes and Ellison or exchanging friendly banter with a young sex worker (Chloë Grace Moretz) who, one quickly surmises, is in a lot of trouble. It’s trouble that animates the hidden Bob, the Bob we came to see, the Bob who takes out a quintet of very scary Russian heavies in half a minute with a corkscrew and a paperweight and whatever else is at hand.

Written by Richard Wenk (The Mechanic, The Expendables 2), The Equalizer, inspired by the eponymous 1980s television series about a former CIA operative, reunites Washington with his Training Day director Antoine Fuqua. Fuqua knows we came to see Bob kick ass but wants us to wait for it, approaching The Equalizer as equal parts character study and exploitive vigilante actioner. My problem with this approach is that there’s only so much character to study and the action sequences are even more belaboured than the quiet ones. Fuqua chooses, for example, to gives us an awkward prelude to Bob’s first act of violence that’s a bit like Joseph Gordon Levitt’s Googlemap street scan in Premium Rush, shooting the camera into Washington’s eyeball before showing his analysis of his adversaries, the room and its contents. Fuqua shoots actions from four angles when one would suffice. He lingers over things when swiftness seems called for.

It needn’t be thus. One elegantly edited sequence elides an act of violence altogether, moving from a scene in which Bob witnesses a robbery and memorizes the perpetrator’s licence plate, to a scene in which he calmly borrows a sledgehammer from the store’s supply, to one in which a cashier discovers that one of the stolen items has inexplicably reappeared to one in which Bob calmly cleans and replaces the sledgehammer to its original place. This sequence is a fine example of narrative economy very much in keeping with the central character’s sensibility. It also drew great laughs from the audience with whom I watched the film. We understood exactly what transpired and took perverse satisfaction in the compact way it was implied. This sequence is, unfortunately, an exception in The Equalizer, a 132-minute film that ends four times but could have been a sleek, say, 93 minutes and ended at its peak of inevitable vengeance.

What irony. Washington is well cast as Bob, and Bob, though his murderous, pre-emptive ethics are exceedingly dubious, appeals to us because he’s obsessed with making everything clean, mean, efficient, no bullshit. I would much rather have seen his cut of the movie.

                    

Flying high

A carefully executed, impressively unnerving set-piece occurs early in Robert Zemeckis’ Flight: when the jet under his command suddenly undergoes cataclysmic mechanical failure, seasoned commercial airline pilot Whip Whittaker (Denzel Washington) drains the fuel tanks, flips the plane upside-down and glides it into an emergency landing in a field behind a rural Georgia church. The sequence is rendered that much more suspenseful by our knowledge that Whip’s wasted: he woke that morning in an Orlando hotel with the help of some beer, a blunt, some coke and a couple of single-serve vodkas. While everyone else onboard panics, Whip keeps his cool and, as a result, saves a hundred lives; only six perish.

So an interesting question develops over the course of Flight’s first third: was Whip’s state of intoxication actually some sort of aid in his virtuoso, virtually miraculous feat of airmanship? In his resolutely cool, calm and contained performance, Washington—whose recent work has molded him into the top gun of all forms of American transportation (see Unstoppable and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3)—would seem to support this thorny theory of grace under pressure. But we know where this is going. Soon as Whip gets home from the hospital he’s flushing all the dope down the toilet and dumping all the beer down the sink (it’s mostly Corona, but still). The union hires a whip-smart Johnny Cochrane (Don Cheadle) to ensure that Whip’s Toxicology report gets dismissed from the investigation. Meanwhile, Whip hooks up with Nicole (Kelly Reilly), a junkie who undergoes a nearly fatal overdose in perfect concert with Whip’s own nosedive. Nicole opts for cold turkey and AA meetings, but Whip’s resistant to join her. Stressed out by the investigation and the news groups constantly assembling outside of every building he enters, he swiftly jumps off the wagon.

The crash’s proximity to church, the omnipresent crucifixes, the lawyer’s motion to enter “Act of God” into the possible causes of the accident: Flight is taking the high, even holy, road to redemption. Screenwriter John Gatins (Real Steel) builds an intriguing and morally complex story about the weird confluence of instinct, control, circumstance and body chemistry. We know that Whip’s in trouble and needs help. We also know he’s a genuine hero and was clearly not responsible for the loss of life on Flight 227; on the contrary, it’s repeated several times that no one else could have saved the lives that he did. In the film’s final third, Whip is given two tests of will. He fails one utterly and—by the moral logic of Gatins’ script—he passes the other with flying colours. But consider this: when Whip’s willpower fails, he’s sober; when, during a hearing regarding the crash, Whip finally does the ostensibly right thing, he’s drunk! And I mean, super-stinko-drunk. And high on coke. And consider this: that “right thing” that Whip does helps no one, distracts the public and industry alike from the very serious mechanical failures responsible for the crash, and essentially ruins Whip’s life. It’s a peculiar confusion of purposes: Whip’s an Icarus figure, to be punished for (literally) flying too high, yet he’s granted what is, in politically correct, 12-step program terms, a Hollywood ending. However you try to make sense of it, it’ll make you seriously consider taking the train. 

Off the rails: The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

Based on the 1973 novel by Morton Freedgood (writing as John Godfrey), this thriller, filmed previously in 1974 and 1998, finds an NYC subway car hijacked by thugs threatening to kill a passenger a minute if they don’t get $10,000,000 in an hour. Brian Helgeland’s new, gizmo-heavy script has alpha thug Ryder (John Travolta, with conspicuously dyed hair, brows and handlebar) striking up a strangely chatty repartee with Garber (Denzel Washington, paunchy, bespectacled, stubbornly handsome), the MTA employee who first takes Ryder’s demands and thereafter becomes the only negotiator Ryder’s willing to deal with. Discovering that Garber stands accused of accepting a bribe, Ryder apparently identifies with what he views as Garber’s victimization at the hands of an unjust corporate and/or social hierarchy. At one point Ryder gets especially vulnerable and shares a traumatic memory of getting shit on by an Icelandic sled dog while on a date with an ass model. Their interplay and its macho—at times homoerotic—sense of connection are, needless to say, deeply silly.

But Tony Scott is, to say the very least, a deeply silly filmmaker. “I never get excited by coincidence,” Garber says in an early scene, but Scott clearly get excited by absolutely everything, regardless of how inane or pointless it might be. His spastic editing and love of blaring soundtracks, his inability to settle upon anything for more than half a second or keep his camera from aimlessly circling his subjects: all these habits combine to make a monstrously glossy cocktail that in its way something to behold. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is as undeniably diverting as it is stupid, though it gets less diverting and more stupid as it goes—see the superfluous faux-suspense sequence where a subway car hurtles toward a destruction we've already been told isn't going to occur, or the nonsensical showdown/show-off/suicidal finale.

However, Pelham 1 2 3 also holds a certain interest simply as a broad portrait of contemporary Manhattan, strikingly contrasting the dinginess of the 74 version with its high-tech transit management, its police force as virtual standby army, and its surprisingly complex characterization of its municipal leaders, with James Gandolfini giving a fun performance as Hizzonor. Garber seems the avatar of this whole vision of a city that’s equally culturally diverse, overwhelming in terms of busyness and bureaucracy, and somehow cozy. The final image of Garber cheerfully bringing a full gallon of milk home to his apparently lactose-starved wife (Aunjanue Ellis, lovely and totally game in a goofy bit part) rather audaciously leaves his guilt in the bribery scandal totally ambiguous. And there’s something oddly charming, if absurd, about the sense that for all the extra drama, this was all just another day at the office for this hard-working New Yorker.