The Equalizer

What do vigilante movies have in common with teen slasher flicks? Victims. You know who's going to die. The question is how? And how soon?

That's all this is. Murder most foul on a continuous loop and since it's the good guy dishing out death you are allowed to applaud.

The moral duty of writers and directors is to be honest. Once it becomes gratuitous they are guilty of pandering to public opinion. Action pics are violent on purpose and plots try to outsicken the last, which means the make-up crew has to double its order for fake blood.

McCall (Denzel Washington) works in a warehouse. He's conscientious, quiet, a bit of a control freak who lives in the tidiest apartment in New York. He can't sleep and so wanders over to the all night diner for a fresh cup of tea where he sits alone, reading Hemingway and Melville.

He makes friends with Teri (Chloe Grace Moretz), a teenage hooker who is pimped by vicious looking Eastern European thugs. After they hospitalise her McCall comes out of retirement and starts decimating the whole damn lot of them.

Of course, you know by now that he's an ex government assassin who was officially killed sometime in the past. Now he's alive (unofficially), taking on the entire Russian mafia single handed.

There isn't the hint of a joke, nor a memorable line and for the first 40 minutes the pace is stuck at Level Yawn.

McCall is bulletproof, naturally, while the villains are tattooed like trailer park scum except for their boss (Marton Csokas) who looks like a trader on Wall Street and behaves like Islamic State.

There is no heart to this film. No originality. No emotional hook.

R.I.P