The Equalizer

I have a very particular set of skills ... 

not including my wardrobe.

Grade: B –

Director: Antoine Fuqua

Starring: Denzel Washington, Marton Csokas, Chloë Grace Moretz and David Harbour

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 11 min.

The only reference point today’s film audiences may have to The Equalizer is that it’s the television program that caused Rob Reiner’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street to launch into a profane tirade if anyone interrupted him watching it.

The late ‘80s TV series starring the late Edward Woodward now gets its own big screen treatment from director Antoine Fuqua, who directed Denzel Washington’s Oscar-winning turn in Training Day.Washington reteams with Fuqua in The Equalizer to assume the role of Robert McCall, a meticulous, middle-aged widower who works in a big box home improvement store by day and sits alone in a corner cafe reading classic literature by night.

When a Russian pimp brutalizes Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz, Kick-Ass), a young hooker harbouring a kind heart and pop star ambitions who hangs out in McCall’s nocturnal diner, McCall reluctantly springs into action … the sort of action that involves slaughtering five members of the Russian mob in under 30 seconds.

That gets the attention of the kingpin back in Mother Russia, who dispatches Teddy (Marton Csokas), his head henchman, to track down the mystery man dispensing with his hired help and disrupting his nefarious business enterprises.

Unfortunately for the Bolshevik baddies, McCall possesses a secret backstory and a very particular set of skills, especially involving the use of power tools and assorted hardware that he employs to starting serving justice on crooked cops and robbers alike.

Indeed, it’s the sort of role Liam Neeson plays nowadays when he’s not busy. And notwithstanding its TV predecessor, Fuqua fashions his Equalizer as a standard vigilante throwback not far removed from Death Wish and Dirty Harry. McCall blows through a cavalcade of Euro-fodder without much in the way of impediments or intrigue. McCall’s one-man-gang upends not only the Russians’ prostitution ring, but also their money laundering hideout and oil tankers.

What equalizes this otherwise formulaic film is the typically captivating Washington, from his quiet counsel to Teri to his taut tête-à-tête with Teddy. Indeed, it’s beguiling to just watch McCall meticulously arrange the silverware at his usual diner table each evening … or stare into his cold eyes as he digs a corkscrew into someone’s mandible or pelts another with a nail gun.

Neither McCall or The Equalizer say very much about our nasty zeitgeist. But all things being equal, there are worse ways to spend a trip to the movie theater … or The Home Depot.

Flight

Grade: B

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Starring: Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Don Cheadle, Bruce Greenwood and Kelly Reilly

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 8 min.

For quite some time, I’ve had an idea for a movie. The basic premise involves an everyman who wins the lottery, seemingly guaranteeing him lifelong security and happiness. However, this seminal event soon alienates him from suddenly envious, greedy friends and family. Moreover, his newfound celebrity status becomes an albatross once the 24-hour media that builds him up uncovers and airs his personal foibles (an old arrest here, an extramarital affair there) in their insatiable hunt for tomorrow’s headline or talking point.

It’s perilous to evaluate a movie based on what you hoped it might be. Still, Flight had the potential to dissect that tragic arc of the accidental celebrity. Captain William “Whip” Whitaker (Denzel Washington) is an airline pilot who executes a miraculous crash landing of his suddenly freefalling plane en route from Orlando to Atlanta, saving all but a few of its 102 passengers. Although rightly hailed as a hero, Whip is also secretly an alcoholic and drug user whose demons destroyed his marriage and estranged him from his teenage son.

The key additional plot point is that Whip was also drunk and coked up during his aerial miracle, needing to ingest both substances together in order to achieve inflight acuity—to “level him off,” so to speak. So instead of a critique on contemporary culture, director Robert Zemeckis makes Flight a character study more akin to The Lost Weekend or Leaving Las Vegas. Alternating episodes of binge boozing and short-lived sobriety become the film’s repetitive refrain, often in concert with Whip’s newfound (and rather improbable) relationship with Nicole (Kelly Reilly), a recovering heroin junkie hoping to steer the captain towards sobriety.

Directing his first live-action film since 2000’s Cast Away, Zemeckis still knows how to assemble impressive set pieces. A taut takeoff through storm-cloud turbulence is only a table setter for the amazing crash sequence, whose one of the most breathless scenes in recent cinema. Still, every protracted exchange between Whip and Nicole stops the film dead in its tracks when it should be focusing on the procedural particulars of the ever-tightening investigation into the plane crash and the efforts by a pilot’s union rep (Bruce Greenwood) and lawyer (Don Cheadle) to save Whip’s self-destructive backside.

No time is devoted to the undoubtedly conflicted feelings of the passengers whose lives Whip saved or the families of those who didn’t survive. And while the emotional pain is palpable when Whip strong-arms the loyalty of Margaret (Tamara Tunie), his flight attendant and an old friend well aware of Whip’s addictions, a visit to his crippled copilot is used as an occasion for religious mockery. The sight of Whip’s foundering airplane clipping the steeple off a rural church serves a similar subversion, along with the sardonic testimonial by a terminal cancer patient (James Badge Dale) who Whip and Nicole meet while sneaking ciggies in the hospital stairwell.

Ever the Steven Spielberg protégé, Zemeckis can’t resist his mentor’s penchant for soppy endings and heavy-handed metaphors, or his own crutch of classic-rock music cues. Buttressed by another career-defining performance from Washington, the ill-fated aircraft parallels the path of its protagonist: a life in free fall that must be inverted to level off its descent before a crash landing that starts him down a course of introspection and redemption. Still, Flight could have cast a wider cultural net about the media, hero (de)construction and survivor guilt, not just the story of one self-absorbed antihero.

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com 

Safe House

You talkin' to me?

Grade: B
Director: Daniel Espinosa
Starring: Denzel Washington, Ryan Reynolds, Vera Farmiga, Brendan Gleeson, Sam Shepard
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hr. 54 min.

Training Day will turn out to be the defining film in Denzel Washington’s career, but not for the reasons you might expect. Yes, the cop-gone-bad drama gave Washington his lone Best Actor Oscar win, but it also (forever?) altered his role choices/selection. Before then, Washington was playing the likes of Malcom X and “Hurricane” Carter and appearing in films such as Glory (for which he won a Supporting Actor Oscar), Courage Under Fire, and Philadelphia. There were Spike Lee joints (Mo’ Better Blues and He Got Game), social uplift films (Cry Freedom and A Soldier’s Story) and even Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing).

Since Training Day, Washington’s performances remain strong but his characters increasingly coalesce around a steady series of cop dramas and man-of-action thrillers, four of them directed by the Scott brothers (three by Tony, one from Ridley). Although Safe House is helmed by Swedish director Daniel Espinosa, it borrows not only Tony Scott’s gritty color palette but a half-dozen other genre clichés. Remarkably, it all comes together for a rather entertaining rumpus.

Washington plays Tobin Frost, a rogue ex-CIA operative who is nine years into peddling secrets for money. When a big buy goes bust in Cape Town, South Africa, Frost surprisingly takes refuge in the U.S. consulate. Needing a place to temporarily stow—and apply enhanced interrogation methods to—Frost, the C.I.A. ferry him to a local safe house manned by low-level company man Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds).

After a band of baddies raze the hideout, Weston is the only one left to deliver Frost to higher authorities, which Weston must do sans any certainty over who is really friend or foe. He keeps one eye on those giving chase and one on the crafty, ice-cold Frost, whose Lecter-like acuity proves his most lethal weapon.

Safe House is essentially Jason Bourne meets 3:10 to Yuma, down to a villain being the film’s most charismatic character (Yuma) and a group of constipating, backbiting bureaucrats (Brendan Gleeson, Vera Farmiga, Sam Shepard) back at Langley (Bourne). Despite his treacherous past, we’re virtually preordained to like Frost, seemingly because he knows his fine wines and, well, looks like Denzel Washington.

Still, there’s a palpable, to-and-fro chemistry between Washington and Reynolds, who gives his best performance since 2010’s Buried. Despite its derivative dollops, Espinosa flashes a distinctive style, one in which fights aren’t always quick and clean and death is often slow and ugly. And who else besides a Swedish director would set one of his film’s best cat-and-mouse sequences inside a packed soccer match?

Plot holes persist, as in any film of this sort. But they are not as crippling thanks to the film’s intensity and Washington and Reynolds’ taut tête à tête. Safe House may not have the most solid foundation, but it’s a fun place to steal away for a few hours.

Neil Morris

Unstoppable

Quick, we have to stop this train before the hard drive crashes!

Grade: B

Director: Tony Scott

Starring: Denzel Washington, Chris Pine, Rosario Dawson, Kevin Dunn, Kevin Corrigan, and Lew Temple

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 38 minutes

With a thundering sound mix drowned out only by the den of apposite popcorn-munching throughout the theater, Unstoppable is the quintessential example of a film that doesn’t try to be anything more than it is. An unmanned, half-mile-long freight train carrying thousands of gallons of hazardous phenol acid barrels through the Western Pennsylvania countryside at 70 mph, its destination the densely populated city of Stanton. It falls on two rail workers – veteran engineer Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington) and newbie conductor Will Colston (Chris Pine) – to chase down and stop the “coaster” before disaster hits.

Loosely based on the 2001 “Crazy Eights” unmanned train incident in Ohio, Director Tony Scott amplifies his typical camera-in-a-blender action sequences with depictions of frenzied media coverage – including swooping news choppers, filmed using other unseen choppers – and dubious corporate agendas being foiled by hardnosed track manager Connie Hooper (Rosario Dawson). And, Barnes and Colston are provided just enough back-story while riding the rails to feign character development.

Mostly, however, this is prototypical white-knuckle intensity that is slickly produced and – notwithstanding the pseudo-elephant trumpet that blares every time the runaway train rolls by – more reserved than Scott and Washington’s more recent collaborations, Man on Fire, Deja Vu, and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. Unstoppable fits the criteria of the sort of movie Max Cherry said he wanted to see in Jackie Brown: something that starts soon and looks good.

Neil Morris

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

Rail Rage

Grade: C

Director: Tony Scott

Starring: Denzel Washington, John Travolta, James Gandolfini, Luis Guzman, and John Turturro

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 46 minutes

Tony Scott is like the Rafael Palmeiro of filmmaking. Both were mid-to-upper standouts in their respective fields until avarice and self-indulgence persuaded them to artificially – and detrimentally – enhance their innate abilities. For Palmeiro, it was taking steroids for more hits and homers. For Scott, it is the audio-visual gimcracks he has allowed to infect his films the past decade: The jump-cuts, the slow motion, the freeze frames, the oversaturated color schemes, the time-lapse photography, the clanging, hip-hop-lite soundtracks by Harry Gregson-Williams. Its false bravado masquerading as cocksure preening, with little but car crashes and actors yelling at the camera to approximate the illusion of narrative drive.

You will quickly realize it is business as usual in Scott’s remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 when you hear the openings strains of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” a six-year-old rap song with no apparent contextual connection to the film. In between herky-jerky images of the New York City skyline and subway system, we glimpse the blurry apparition of Ryder (John Travolta), a tattooed, racist ex-commodities trader making his way underground where he will lead the hijacking of the 6 train from Pelham Bay Park.

Denzel Washington (appearing in his fourth collaboration with Scott) plays MTA dispatcher Walter Garber, presumably named in part after Walter Matthau, who played then-Lt. Zachery Garber in director Joseph Sargent’s fondly held 1974 film adaptation of John Godey’s source novel. Garber finds himself in the unfortunate position of ad hoc negotiator with Ryder, who demands $10 million in an hour or he will execute one hostage for every tardy minute.

The miscast Travolta never firmly establishes Ryder’s persona: One minute he is a shrewd, diabolical nemesis, the next a ranting, raving lunatic unraveling under the pressure of his hair-brained scheme. Every time the high-pitched Travolta shrieks one of his many MF-bombs, he sounds as if he’s reading them off cue cards.

The stolid screenwriting combo of David Koepp and Brian Helgeland meekly attempt to introduce some moral ambiguity into Garber’s character, a device that worked well when applied to Nick Nolte’s protagonist in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear remake. But, Garber’s “confession” that he once accepted a work-related bribe comes only under Ryder’s threat to shoot a hostage if Garber doesn’t come clean. If that’s not sanitized enough for you, he also reveals that he spent the bribe money on his kids’ college tuition.

Initial police suspicion that Garber might be working in cahoots with Ryder is an intriguing angle that would have added another dimension to the procedural plotline, but it dissipates without comment as quickly as it materializes. So, too, with the discovery that Ryder’s true financial target is not cash but rather stock market manipulation: The last time we hear anything about that is when the city’s mayor (James Gandolfini) announces he is marching down to the SEC to look into any of Ryder’s recent, suspicious transactions. Just a suggestion, I’d say all of them.

The film’s banality reaches its nadir when Scott rolls out the most anticlimactic ending this side of brother Ridley’s American Gangster. Let’s just say a crime rooted in intricate planning and cunning execution comes down to one guy walking across an overpass getting caught by another guy running across an overpass. If that sounds exciting, then boy, do I have a bridge to sell you.

Neil Morris

The Great Debaters

Oprah said I was the star...

No, she said I was the star...

Grade: B –
Starring: Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, Nate Parker, Denzel Whitaker, and Jurnee Smollett
Rating: PG
Running Time: 2 hours, 3 minutes

Commendable and engrossing yet stirring and formulaic, The Great Debaters is cut from the same cloth as most inspirational Hollywood uplifts. It is blessed with many aspects: a compelling backstory, a fine cast, a workmanlike script, and, perhaps more important, the imprimatur of Oprah Winfrey. There is also the temptation to lump this dramatization of the 1935 all-black debate team at Marshall, Texas' Wiley College in with such recent similarly-themed films as Glory Road and Pride. The difference, however, is that while the history of white America has been told to such a degree that Hollywood now draws upon NFL special-teams walk-ons as the subjects for their sports movies, most of the chapters in the African-American experience have been lost, while those that have not yearn to be moralized.

In his sophomore directorial effort, Denzel Washington tracks the story of Wiley’s triumph over Jim Crow-era segregation by barnstorming the country competing against both black and white colleges, culminating with a climactic contest against reigning champions Harvard University. In reality, Wiley’s season concluded with a trip to the University of Southern California, the actual national champions, for a debate whose outcome has been lost in the dustbin of history.

Washington’s direction is unadorned, lagging far behind his usual fine work in front of the camera, here as debate coach, professor, and legendary poet Melvin B. Tolson. Forest Whitaker’s performance as Dr. James Farmer, Sr., the first black doctorate in Texas, hits just the right note in his complex relationship with his debate-team son (Denzel Whitaker - yes, that is his real name). As the obligatory Troubled Team Member, Nate Parker essentially plays the same character he filled in Pride, while Jurnee Smollett’s Samantha channels an overwrought elocution that, when she debates/speechifies, jarringly transforms her Texas drawl into a Maya Angelou retread.

For all its earnestness and import, the film scores low in two respects. First is the character of Parker’s Henry Lowe, who almost comically retreats to the seedy side of whatever town he happens to be whenever adversity – ranging from the sight of a lynched youngster to pre-debate jitters – comes knocking on his door. More significant is the lack of creativity the screenplay demonstrates by having Wiley conveniently assigned the “correct” side of every debate. It is not hard to sound inspired when you are arguing in favor of welfare, school integration, civil disobedience, and economic equality. If only The Great Debaters had shown as much courage as its real-life muses.

Neil Morris

American Gangster

Here's the deal - I tell you what I know, and
you and Ridley let me be in "Gladiator 2"

Grade: B -
Starring: Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Josh Brolin, and Lymari Nadal
Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hours, 37 minutes

Although officially helmed by Ridley Scott, American Gangster plays like the Antoine Fuqua-directed version that never got past pre-production: solid but stolid, honest but derivative, and involving yet indolent. In essence, it is a portrait of contrasts, not merely between its two protagonists but the two halves matted together to create a watchable but unoriginal whole.

It is not just that Denzel Washington channels his ablest incarnation yet of the Training Day/Malcolm X amalgam he regularly regurgitates nowadays, or that Russell Crowe’s Serpico-redux turns in $1 million in found drug money rather than share it with cops-on-the-take who consequently turn against him. The real plagiarism is a story arc that mimics everything from Scarface to Superfly to The Godfather without injecting any artistry or dramatic tension.

Washington plays Frank Lucas, a North Carolina native who in the 1960s moved to New York City where he studied at the feet of infamous Harlem crime boss “Bumpy” Johnson. After Bumpy’s death, Lucas assumes his mentor’s mantle by mounting a drug empire around smuggling pure heroin from Southeast Asia into the U.S. in the coffins of dead American servicemen killed in the Vietnam War. Along the way, Lucas rules his kingdom with an iron hand and cocked gun, warding off threats from rival mob bosses, crooked cops, and ultimately police detective Richie Roberts (Crowe) and his handpicked anti-narcotics squad.

The by-the-numbers script from writer Steven Zaillian vacillates between Lucas and Roberts using parallel storylines. The ironic plot hook, we quickly learn, is that Lucas is a ruthless criminal who loves and cares for his family – most of whom he moves from North Carolina to join his nefarious enterprise – while Roberts is a straight-shooting cop whose personal life comprises a broken marriage, deficient fatherhood, and wandering eye.

The basic problems are two-fold. First, this is fundamentally Frank Lucas’ story, and every minute spent focused on Roberts’ backstory feels like filler, however compelling it might be unto itself. Second is the derivative quality of the Lucas treatment: so little time is devoted or usefully spent on Lucas that we are only left with the bare prerequisites of a docudrama about a Harlem Scarface or Godfather – a violent outburst here, an attempt on his life there, etc. Nary an eyebrow is raised inside or out of Lucas’ inner-circle when he beds and weds a Puerto Rican Beauty Queen during the early 1970s, while the talent of Chewitel Ejiofor is squandered in an underdeveloped role as one of Frank’s younger brothers.

When the narrative orbits of Lucas and Roberts finally intersect, the result is a glossy, almost giddy final act that is tonally out of sync with the rest of the film. In a moment that should wallow in Lucas’ comeuppance, Scott attempts to elevate him to the status of folk hero.

Although generally entertaining, there is a perfunctory, workmanlike air hovering around American Gangster that keeps it from attaining the lofty designs it clearly desires. Then again, the last movie costarring both Denzel and Crowe was Virtuosity, so at least this is an improvement.

Neil Morris