Columbia Pictures, Escape Artists, LStar Capital,
Denzel Washington, Chloë Grace Moretz, Melissa Leo, Bill Pullman, Haley Bennett
Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) lives a lonely and private life, an invisible everyman who follows his routine from day to day. Working in a hardware superstore, and every night visiting the same coffee shop to read. He gets to know a young prostitute Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz) who is interested in his stories. She is under the control of a violent pimp who treats her very badly, and after one extreme beating, Robert steps in to exact revenge to defend Teri, but accidentally pulls him back into his lost former life as an FBI special ops guy when things spiral out of control, in this action update of the 1980’s movie and TV show.
This was an extremely predictable film, nothing really new here, which was probably why I was not overly impressed with this film. Denzel was HARD. He is mostly silent, answers questions with the minimum number of words needed. And boy is he tough. The fight sequences are really incredible. Of course it’s Bruce Lee-like impossible odds fights, but that’s what it’s supposed to be. We’re supposed to believe he can take on a dozen guys at once and whoop them all. I felt that was little overdone as well which also sort of turned me off on the movie. When it gets unbelievable, I lose interest. The story was pretty well written, though as I mentioned rather predictable. I couldn’t say this was a bad movie by any means, but I just wasn’t really impressed that much. I was left with a middle of the road kind of feeling, like it wasn’t really worth all the extra to see this in IMAX. I could have happily waited for the DVD for this film and unless you’ve got a really good reason to go out and pay theater prices for this one, I’d recommend waiting for DVD too. Not a bad movie, but not that memorable, for sure.
EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog
