The Black TAKEN, featuring Home Depot Man.

A retired black ops hitman, trying to blend into quiet suburban life by being a clerk at a hardware store, must use his “particular set of skills” to help a prostitute with a heart of gold.

THE EQUALIZER (based loosely on the 1985 TV series of the same name, starring Edward Woodward) might have retained more cred had it not seemed like some coked-up writer’s pitch to a just-as-coked studio exec at Denny’s at 4 a.m. When he saw the executive’s interest was flagging, the writer consulted his Lethal Weapon/Die Hard/Taken Handbook and threw in another cliché and some more coke.

Denzel Washington is retired espionage agent McCall. His life looks lonely in a sparse apartment, and his job is routine lower-middle-class, working in a massive franchise hardware store called Home Mart [eye-roll]. He’s the guy you can ask anything, and he’ll know what aisle it’s on, and he offers a 10% discount on all rakes!… but McCall’s anal retentiveness and eye for detail mask a far greater skill…

Chloe Grace Moretz is young hooker Teri, whom McCall crosses paths with every night at the same diner. He sits and reads a book while she sits open-legged and face-painted like an obvious hooker at the bar. But writer Richard Wenk (16 BLOCKS, THE EXPENDABLES 2) makes her a reluctant whore, even though her whole demeanor screams “Take me roughly from behind for cash!” She wears ripped short-shorts, lipstick the color of a baboon’s ass in estrus, a bra that pushes her tits into her face to attract customers, yet she flinches when construction workers make kissy noises at her. She’s a regular Saint Hooker of Assisi. And she’s beholden to the Russian Mob. And when her boss orders her on a job, she tries to decline because the client is “a pig.” Next day at the diner, Teri has a bruise on her face – because the guy couldn’t be just a pig – he had to be obese and a beater of women as well. (Don’t mind me while I’m loading the deck, says Wenk.)

And now it’s up to McCall it equalize things between the whore and the mob. How that math works, is anyone’s guess…

Antoine Fuqua brings the mightiest production values to THE EQUALIZER; last directing Denzel in the boisterous TRAINING DAY, Fuqua takes Denzel on an opposite journey here, into the heart of introspection and dad-slacks vigilantism. Referencing Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea, McCall laments that he cannot relinquish that black-ops part of himself no matter how hard he tries. Nice theme, but how far up the chain of command do you draw the line when seeking retribution? McCall’s actions reach a point of diminishing returns when he travels to Moscow to kill the boss of the Russian crime syndicate. Moscow?! All because a hooker got beaten up?! Denzel – I got beaten up and my car was stolen. Can you vigilante my case to the highest chop-shops in the land? Oh, I don’t have a blond poonanny…

Denzel has become so good in these avenger roles that we do not question the paucity of thought that went into the movie’s plot, which is hell-bent on being ten other action movies. Like Teri, McCall can’t just be a retired killer – no, the point of this whole “Equalizer” thing is that he stands for the little guy, he evens the odds, he – equalizes the stakes. So though he is reclusive, he finds time to help a co-worker try to lose weight for a security guard exam; he enacts justice on a robber who holds up his store; is he trying to atone for the sins of his past life by being Mr. Rogers and Liam Neeson and the Powerpuff Girls all at once?

When McCall “borrows” a sledgehammer from the store to use on the robber, does he not consider that maybe the robber is also a “little guy” in a desperate situation that needs his odds equalized? Maybe if someone stood up for that guy, he wouldn’t have turned to small-time crime. Like Superman, McCall thinks beating petty thugs curbs the root of crime, but it just combats the end result of upper echelon crimes against humanity. When a congressperson creates tax breaks for corps, or vetoes funding for education or hospitals, how many more people are ruined or put to death indirectly? You want to “equalize” things, Mr. Socialism? Run for Congress.

The next day, we see McCall wiping the sledgehammer before he racks it – waitaminute! So he brought that sledgehammer back into the store all bloody. How many people in the parking lot did he pass with this bloodied hammer in his hands?; how many security cameras?; how many floor managers and employees? And only now, as he gets to the rack, is he wiping it down? Some kinda special ops guy he was!

When he learns Teri is in hospital after being bashed by her pimp, McCall visits the Russian sanctum sanctorum for a palaver. Into a room full of mobsters he saunters and makes a dollar offer for Teri’s freedom. Upon being refused, he turns and walks to the door. They laugh. He… locks the door. It’s one of those super-man scenes. We know who the last man standing will be. McCall’s eyes scan the room (in a manner not unlike the Downey SHERLOCK HOLMES movies – without the faux-British narration), where all the instruments and methods of his attack are foreshadowed; he estimates out loud it will take him 15 seconds, sets his watch. Then he goes to work. Wading into the Russians fluidly, not cruel, not angry, but efficient, deliberate, dead-eyed, indifferent, using the tools in the room and the thugs’ own bodies against them, and, of course – the aikido weapon of choice – many, many Spock Chops. He checks his watch: 28 seconds. A humorous moment where he registers disappointment with himself, yet pep-talks himself that he can do better next time. It is the best scene in the movie. And it doesn’t belong in this movie.

Bill Pullman and Melissa Leo cameo. I can’t remember why, but they get to do all their lines in pajamas, so they’re even more comfortable than Denzel in his casual slacks.

The platonic TAXI DRIVER relationship between McCall and the prostitute is annoying enough (“She brings her own light” – aww, hell no! Denzel did NOT just say that!), but then the onerous side-story of his mentor relationship with clerk Ralphie (Johnny Skourtis – the Mexican Jack Black) is walkout-worthy. Movie, we don’t care whether Ralphie becomes a security guard, we don’t care when he quits his hardware job, we don’t care he’s back working at his parents’ store… look, Movie, we just – don’t – care.

The finale finds the Russians holding all McCall’s store friends hostage in their own massive hardware store (10% discount on all rakes!). The hostages include Ralphie, whom you’ll be happy to know passed his security guard exam and is now a security guard at his own store, obviously making a hash of it, as he lets all the employees get kidnapped on his first day! The Russians want McCall himself in exchange for the hostages.

This is a job for – Home Depot Man! With skills learned on the mean streets of Aisle 12 (hand tools, electrical and lighting), with his apron strings untied and his cloak—cough—apron flapping in the wind, and with his trusty sidekick, Fat Security Guardian, he keeps the world safe from Russian gangsters who trade in flesh, and people who try to return tools the next day after buying them to use just once, instead of renting them.

They tell McCall to be there in 30 minutes… And McCall takes public transport! Truly casual in his dad-slacks. A bus should get him there sometime after all their toes have been cut off and mailed to their families.

When McCall is late – duh, the bus! – the inefficient Russian thugs are told by their boss (Marton Csokas) to “Kill one” of the hostages. Suddenly, they are distracted by music being turned on through the PA system. They’re Russian thugs and the thing that distracts them from just shooting a nondescript hardware store employee is music on the PA system. Hence their “inefficient” tag.

Marvel as Home Depot Man utilizes the tools of his store (the “tools of his trade,” so to speak), everyday items used to their maximum killing potential, to take out the bad guys one by one, until he faces their leader – with a Hollywood Nail Gun. Now, normal nail guns require the pressure of a nail against a surface to operate in driving in the nail, and wouldn’t hurt a fly if used to shoot nails through the air, but the Hollywood Nail Gun (as proven when first used in LETHAL WEAPON) can shoot nails through the air with the force of Mel Gibson attacking your religion. So we hope that McCall has picked up the right model when he points it at the Russian leader. Thankfully, he has, as the nails are shot over twenty feet with the force of movie studio hubris and contempt behind them.

Thank you, Home Depot Man – everything is Equalized. Movie Equalized to action movie dumb level. Intelligence Equalized to action fan ignorance level.

END

DIE HARD in the White House.

OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN but don’t worry – John McClane is there to– I mean, Gerard Butler is there to pick it back up again.

North Korean terrorists take over the White House, and Secret Service Black Ops Special Forces Seal Team Ninja Mission Impossible Flames-Comin-Out-De-Side Agent Gerard Butler is the fly in the ointment, the spanner in the works, the McClane in the Nakatomi.

The problem with a film of this ilk – White House overrun and President taken hostage – is the foregone conclusion. The terrorists can’t win – not against the White House and the President. They just don’t make movies in America like that. Even if a film with that conclusion ever got funding, it would never be released. Not to worry, patriots: the shot of the bullet-riddled American flag unceremoniously dumped off the White House roof in slomo is a cinematic gimmick. Does anyone believe that flag is going to stay off the roof for very long?

So even though the opening scenes are breathtaking – the president’s car going off a bridge, the bomber attack on the White House, the Washington Monument crumbling – the plot is inconsequential, held up by its brutal action, blood-drunk violence, and audacious twists. It’s R-rated for its constant swearing and gruesomeness (heavy artillery fired into humans, shredding their torsos, point-blank head shots, etc.), but it necessarily has to ramp to hyperbole, to distract its audience from that foregone conclusion.

Funniest scene is when rocket-propelled grenades and heavy artillery are being fired directly into the White House front door and secret service guys are simply running out like video game characters directly into the line of fire with their guns drawn and being mowed down. Musta missed that class on Taking Cover; probably trained by Emperor Palpatine for his elite Stormtrooper detail.

DIRECTOR: ”Hey guys, just get shot and fall over, no need to do the Safety Dance.”

OLYMPUS just makes us question why anyone would want to take over the White House in the first place. What do they hope to achieve? Do they want to run America? Shyeh, good luck with health care and immigration reform, terrorists! You deal with those asshole Republicans… As it happens, terrorist leader Kang (Rick Yune, DIE ANOTHER DAY) just wants American troops out of his country. After 60 years of having American installments there for no reason other than belligerent threat, I think that’s kinda fair, don’t you? Uh-uh. Not gonna happen. Reason: America dicks so big and strong, ooouwah!

Remember, Movie Maniacs, in movies such as this, America is always right. There will BE no rationalization of human rights of other countries; there will BE no citation of sovereignty of other nations and trespassing by America; there will BE no justification to use WMDs on America because only America is allowed to use WMDs on other countries. Manchurian brainwashing complete? Right, let’s move on…

OLYMPUS is just another parable for the American people to ignore. No matter that the startling amount of nukes America has aimed at the world is itself a vulnerability if someone were to take over the firing system and blow them up in your own house; it’s the same concept as having guns around your house with a toddler who can access them.

No listen. No cry.

It might be the serious version of WHITE HOUSE DOWN (Jun 2013), but OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN is every bit as comedic as that film.

Aaron Eckhart is the Pres – wha–? A white president? I’m sure a lot of young kids are scratching their heads watching this strange fiction. When the Pres and VP cowardly retreat to the safety of their bunker 120 feet below ground, Morgan Freeman (as Speaker of the House) takes over as acting Pres. Okay, we can relate again.

Dylan McDermott is Butler’s smarmy secret service pal. Perfect-featured Radha Mitchell is Butler’s inconsequential wife (for reaction shots outside the fray, and to have someone whose arms he can fall into at the end). Melissa Leo is the tortured Secretary of Defense who refuses to give up some McGuffin code. And Angela Bassett does Glenn Close in AIR FORCE ONE and acts the shit out of talking into an intercom. Ashley Judd dies early, and General Robert Forster argues with the black president.

In an obvious misdirection scene, the terrorists put black hoods on a group of hostages and walk them into a helicopter, the president supposedly amongst them. Helicopter takes off, explodes. Omigod! President dead too?! Nope. Not gonna happen. American movie. CAN’T happen. The censors will not allow it.

Final scenes, consult happy ending flow chart. As orchestra swoons behind him, white president gives Speech No.7 from the Flesh-Crawling Speeches handbook that Morgan Freeman flipped through in DEEP IMPACT.

“Our foe came to desecrate our way of life…” — oh, not like you desecrate all those other ways of life around the globe. You are not in ANY WAY regarding this White House attack as blowback for your troops in other countries; there is NO POSSIBLE WAY America might be ethically wrong for aiming so many nukes at everyone else. The very fact that your code name for your leadership headquarters is “Olympus” bespeaks your insidious arrogance and hubris and utter lack of humility. Owning the biggest arsenal in the world doesn’t mean you are the smartest, strongest, or even most worthy to survive into the future. It just means you have the biggest dicks and the smallest brains.

Manchurian brainwashing complete. Olympus HAS fallen.

END

If the movie career tanks, the guns are still firing for the underpant career.

Shooter is Sharp but Misses the Marky.

SHOOTER achieves that balance between action, political skullduggery, pretty orange explosions and Mark Wahlberg’s big guns (and I don’t mean his military sniper rifles), which notches it a cut above most political thrillers of its paranoid ilk – until its pat ending.

Now that’s a shooter!

With his shrapnel-explosive performance in THE DEPARTED, Wahlberg shrugged off the last vestiges of Marky Mark, so from now on – in deference to this bona fide Actor – I respectfully abstain from any allusions to wigga rap, funky bunches and exposed underpant. (But we’ve still got his biceps and obliques – give a reviewer something to work with!)

Wahlberg is patriot Bob Lee Swagger, USMC sharpshooter, able to hit moving targets over a mile away, who leaves the corp disillusioned after a morally-ambiguous mission in Ethiopia goes all hela-snafu. After three idyllic years isolated in panoramic mountains with his big dog, a copy of the 9-11 Commission Report, and web-surfing to “see what propaganda they’re feeding us now,” he receives an unannounced, unwelcome visit from Colonel Isaac Johnson (Danny Glover, lisping badly through his dentures – he really is gettin’ too old for this shit), who wants to hire Swagger for a unique mission – to deter a presidential assassination by scoping out potential methods on how a sharpshooter of Swagger’s caliber may be able to pull it off.

Though we could hear a frame-up coming like an eighteen-wheeler with a bad clutch, our boy Swagger obliviously swaggers into it. If his mind is soft, his body is still hard (calm down, ladies!), and he fields two bullet wounds and a green FBI agent (Michael Peña – last seen under a WORLD TRADE CENTER) to escape narrowly with his life, while a whole government arm deploys to manhunt him when they should be saving hostages in Iran or fixing potholes on my street.

Peña is Nick Memphis, who refuses to accept the “official” FBI version of Swagger’s assassination attempt, due to inadvertently being bitch-slapped by Swagger himself during his escape. His jigsaw construction of the clues leads him to ally with Swagger, who has in turn allied with Sarah (Kate Mara), the girlfriend of a dead fellow soldier. Which kinda annoys for its cliché. Let’s not kid ourselves – when the “ally-with-the-dead-buddy’s-ex” scenario arises in a movie, the girl is ALWAYS single and it ALWAYS leads to panty – I think the first clue might have been when Sarah opens her door to the filthy, terrified, near-death Swagger (who is no more than a mild acquaintance), dressed in nothing but see-through top and undies, not bothering to close her robe. Then we just sit back and wait for Wahlberg to get the guns out… which he does, as she dresses his wounds, which in movie parlance is just another method of foreplay.

Swagger and Memphis uncover the all-purpose “corrupt government plot” behind Swagger’s setup, with quite obvious digs at the George W. administration along the way. (At this juncture – 2007, four years into an unwinnable war after two years in an unwon war – it’s quite easy to dig and get a collective amen.) When Colonel Johnson lisps, “Do we allow America to be ruled by thugs?” Swagger replies, “Some years we do.” Oh, snap!

Directed by Antoine Fuqua, from Jonathan Lemkin‘s screenplay of Stephen Hunter‘s novel, Point of Impact, Swagger’s quest terminates Rade Sherbedgia and Elias Koteas as bad guys along the ladder, Ned Beatty eventually uncovered as the corrupt senator atop the ladder, reveling in the nation’s political audacity and his perceived impunity, “We live in a country where the Secretary of Defense can go on national tv and say it’s about freedom and not about oil.” “The bosses know. We know their bosses know. The problem is in admitting that the leaders know.” With his words, this movie might as well be handing out subpoenas to Rumsfeld, Bush, Rove, Cheney and Wolfowitz.

It is astounding to realize that the definition of Patriot has flip-flopped to someone who DOES own a copy of the 9-11 Commission Report. Not ten years ago, anyone surfing the web, mumbling about propaganda would have been considered treasonous. But Swagger is painted as the reddest, whitest and bluest Patriot in this film – BECAUSE he questions the government. Illustrates how adversely the George W. Klan has affected the United States: that the HERO of a popular movie – not “anti-hero” or “ambiguous villain” – can criticize the administration so loudly and meet with vindication rather than stultification.

But this is where the film meanders into “We Can Dream, Can’t We?” status. The conspiracy reaches to such high government offices that Beatty’s character is right to contemptuously sneer about one sharpshooter not being able to curb it. But after a faux-climax that does not payoff (a grand, panoramic shootout in snowy mountains) and a military hearing which also does not payoff (where Swagger demonstrates his big gun – the one that can counter the earth’s Coriolis effect with its power, not the one that can make ladies drop trou when body-oiled), we know that a REAL climax is coming, one of insensible – yet Eastwood-ian avenger – proportions. (Cue pretty orange explosions.)

It doesn’t seem to matter to the film-makers that Swagger’s methodology is only the corrupt administration’s Decider-like tyranny and Might-Is-Right anarchy turned back on themselves – which therefore does not raise the Hero morally above his opponents but abandons him right amongst them. The paradox is that the parochial W. Bush administration regards only those people who support and behave like them (i.e. morally bankrupt) as the only true Patriots.

So after SHOOTER succinctly sends the disheartening, yet intrinsically correct message that you can’t clean up the insidious corruption amongst elected officials with a big gun – Bob Lee Swagger does just that.

Now that’s a Patriot.

END