The Equalizer

Denzel Washington possesses an effortless sort of charisma, which in recent years has worked against him, resulting in a lot of affable but weak performances in faceless genre dreck like 2 Guns and The Taking of Pelham 123. The idea of Washington starring in an origin story of The Equalizer, the fairly obscure Edward Woodward series that aired on CBS in the 1980s (although it borrows almost as much from its ABC competitor MacGyver) didn't exactly quicken my pulse, but director Antoine Fuqua's film is a cut above. It's a stylish and nasty revenge epic about a solitary man who is secretly an ex-military killing machine, skills he puts to use disposing of sadistic Russian gangsters and corrupt Boston cops. Fuqua refuses to dial it down a single centimeter, going for an operatic over-the-top-ness that culminates with a glorious action bloodbath in a home improvement warehouse store.