Nothing’s better than a movie about bad guys that accidentally mess with an even badder guy. The “John Wick” saga continues to hold up as the standard of that trope — but the same year that Chad Stahelski and Keanu Reeves introduced the Baba Yaga, Antoine Fuqua teamed up with Denzel Washington to unveil their own vision of vengeance. Their collaboration sired Washington’s first (and only!) franchise to date, and its first entry, “The Equalizer,” remains its most solid.
While “The Equalizer” is based on the 1980s series of the same name, Fuqua and Washington deliver an appropriately-grisly update to the story. As Robert McCall, Washington might have found his most terrifying character to date. McCall is an ex-Special Forces officer with a particularly ruthless set of skills — and while he seems to live a mild-mannered life now, he can become the bogeyman with a flip of a switch. In the first “Equalizer,” Washington wages a one-man war against the Russian mafia to save a teenaged sex worker (Chloë Grace Moretz) from a life of abuse. Every kill is more brutal than the last, and as the franchise goes on, McCall feels more like the villain in a slasher movie than a folk hero. Thankfully, “The Equalizer” keeps things simple in its first outing. It’s the perfect film to throw on when you’re in need of some catharsis — or if you just want to watch Washington be cool as hell for a few hours.