THE EQUALIZER

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND OUCH

Without wanting to sound like a broken record, but this is yet another example of the BBFC showing grotesque leniency to a distributor who's asked for a lower certificate, and who's got it after frankly insignificant trims to a couple of moments from a film that's positively awash with blood and slaughter. There is no way on Earth that this spectacularly violent action thriller, far more graphic and sweary than the still-18 rated Die Hard, should have got away with a 15 since the minimal cuts have by definition placed it right on the dividing line between 15 and 18. Distributors should grow some balls and accept the adults-only rating that comes with an adults-only film, and the BBFC should remember that their job is not to issue meaningless certificates just to make the studios richer. It's not really an issue that the cuts have neutered the film - if you can spot the edits in amidst the remaining carnage you've a better eye than mine - but there does seem to be a growing obsession with getting audiences into films which are patently unsuitable for them.

Nominally it's based on the 1980s TV show with Edward Woodward: here The Equalizer is Denzel Washington, apparently an ordinary guy working in the US equivalent of Homebase. He's friendly, helpful, but keeps to himself....until a teenage girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) he occasionally chats to in an all-night diner gets beaten up and, as a "knight in a world without knights" (his literature choices aren't the subtlest signposts of the way the film's going), he feels a growing need to intervene. This ultimately means taking on, and taking down, most of the Russian Mafia, with the final showdown in Homebase amidst its shelves of barbed wire, drills and blowtorches....

All this is good nasty fun with a healthy dose of the kind of graphic violence we don't tend to get in movies any more, and I enjoyed it immensely. Sometimes you get a Denzel Washington badass action movie that's really bloody and not very good - Man On Fire for one - but even though this one takes a while to get going, preferring to spend its time establishing character (to the extent that one of his revenge missions takes place entirely offscreen; we just see him put the hammer back on the shelf afterwards), it's well put together, and nicely shot with an old-fashioned feel about it. Sure, it's not much of an intellectual piece: the villains are all nasty evil hateful murderous boo-hiss scum with not a likable corpuscle between them, and there's no surprise twist in the plot because there's barely a plot to start with.

Perhaps, if you're a bit of a beard-stroking Guardianista, you could also take issue with the film's gender representation. Of the five female speaking roles, two are hookers for whom things go extremely badly (one is played by Chloe Grace Moretz who, let's remember, is only seventeen), two of the others are supporting non-hooker victims, and the fifth merely provides a chunk of exposition. But this isn't a film for wet liberal sensibilities: it's a film for people who want to watch Denzel Washington hurt a lot of people with DIY implements, and marking it down for its attitude to the ladies is like knocking a star off Four Weddings And A Funeral for its lack of running chainsaws. As a grim, needlessly violent exploitation movie with lots of dead people and kill shots that would have made it a video nasty a generation ago, I enjoyed it far more than I suppose I should have.

****