Equalizer (Movie)

Why is this movie so dark?  Not dark as in psychologically, but like actually dark. It seems like every scene takes place at night or in a room with the lights off.  The big climactic fight at the end takes place at night in a home improvement store with no electricity. For added effect, the climax of the big climactic fight happens as the sprinklers are going off!  Now, part of the issue I had was that I watched this late at night on an iPad and that may have been the reason it seemed especially dark. So after complaining for a paragraph about the lighting, I'll give it a pass.

I thought one of the best lines was when Denzel's character was talking to his coworker about goals and improvement and told him that the goal was "progress, not perfection."  I've adopted this as a personal mantra of sorts, which is the reason I'm not eating a second package of Pop-Tarts right now.  While I liked the quote on a personal basis, I'm not sure if it fits with the movie because Denzel's character is a pretty damn perfect killing machine. And not just killing. To survive the movie he uses surveillance, interrogation, explosives, evasion tactics, and just general survive ability instincts.  I mean, he single handily destroys a Russian crime organization. And I know that "Russian crime organization" is screenwriter shorthand for "really bad guys" but these guys seemed to know what they were doing. They were smart, ruthless, and had tons of money. Good guys or bad, those are usually the people/groups that win. Especially when they're fighting one old (no offense Denzel) guy.

I guess I'm just having trouble figuring out what progress Denzel made. Sure he was leading a lonely, solitary life and now he's using his skills to help the downtrodden. But that was just something he decided to do and then went and did it. He didn't have to struggle and develop and grow. One day he's working in a home improvement store, the next he's killing a bunch (5? 6? I don't know, it was dark.) of Russian mobsters. Oh, and he's still going to work in the home supply store.

This movie was also appealing to me because, as I wrote earlier, the big climactic fight happens in the home improvement store where he works. And while the Russian baddies have guns and knives, Denzel kills them all with items in the store. Why he never picked up one of their guns and knives is beyond me though. Kill a guy with a drill to the back of the neck?  "Sure, I'm cool with that." Pick up his gun after and use it to shoot the guys with guns from a safe distance? "Nah, guns are evil."  (Please note that those are not actually quotes from the movie.) I just had a terrible thought...was this actually a pro-gun movie? Like the message was that well sure guns can kill people, but so can drills and barbed wire and shards of broken mirror. And we can't ban those things, so we shouldn't ban guns. Oh my god I hope that wasn't the message. 

But I can't remember hearing/seeing a reason why Denzel's character didn't use guns. I'm all good if a hero character doesn't want to use guns. But they are a fairly useful way to kill Russian ex-military bad guys who are trying to kill you. And using guns to do try and do that. So if the hero doesn't use guns, there's usually a part where he/she says something like "I promised I would never again use a gun to kill people after I accidentally shot INSERT NAME (usually someone they loved or a clear innocent, like a child)."  So what gives here? Denzel's character is highly trained in the art of killing people with random objects. But that sort of training usually happens after someone is highly trained in the art of killing people with objects specifically designed to fucking kill people.

Anyways, back to the home improvement store thing. I loved this because a few weeks ago at work we spent the week talking about what we would do if we were dropped into Home Depot with random strangers and told, Hunger Games style, that only one of us would be allowed to leave alive. And then here it is in a movie! I got so many ideas from this movie that I definitely think my chances of surviving such an event have improved.