THE EQUALIZER 3 Review

Denzel Washington is sixty-eight years-old and will be sixty-nine this December. I can recall taking note of this fact when writing about the previous Equalizer films as Washington was about to turn sixty shortly after the first premiered. In the last decade Washington, arguably one of our greatest and most charismatic actors, has not only made his first trilogy of films in the Equalizer movies, but has also been busy making character studies with Dan Gilroy, directing August Wilson’s Fences, as well as starring in Shakespeare adaptations with a Coen brother while sprinkling in a few other excursions like Equalizer director Antoine Fuqua's The Magnificent Seven re-make and John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things. 

While eight films in nine years may not seem like the actor is slowing down this most recent decade's worth of work compared to the previous mark some notable shifts in Washington's frame of mind. From 2003 to 2013 Denzel starred in a total of thirteen films, nine of which were first categorized as action movies. Not only was Washington more active in general, but he was choosing more physically demanding projects and while it’s obvious why the actor would want to slow down the older he gets this Equalizer franchise has shown us Denzel can still pull it off when he wants. This all to say, The Equalizer 3 is shockingly slow in its pacing and even when the action ramps up, it is limited. Whether this is to give Washington’s Robert McCall a break as well, because Fuqua wanted a steadier final act for his hero, or simply so that the (somewhat anticlimactic) payoff felt more rewarding after a long stretch of quiet, I’m not sure. Either way, this “choice” doesn’t do so much for the quality of the film as this third and final installment is again a rather by-the-numbers genre picture elevated only by having an actor of Washington’s caliber at the center to carry it.

LIVE BY NIGHT Review

The problem with Live by Night is that it is both too much and never enough. Ben Affleck, who has proved himself a strong storyteller in his screenwriting and directing skills, certainly has a fine ambition in his latest effort, but it simply never seems to pan out the way he originally imagined it. This is to the point that Live by Night is as big, extravagant, and sexy a gangster drama as one could hope to get made in the studio system today and yet the story is nowhere near as compelling as it should be to make the amount of effort put into the costumes, production design, and other period details matter. The question on my mind as the film came to its one too many endings-none of which are satisfactory, I might add-was, "how did this happen?" How did a filmmaker such as Affleck, with a story he himself adapted from a Dennis Lehane novel (Gone, Baby, Gone, Mystic River, Shutter Island, The Drop), in this time period, and with a star-studded cast that features stand-out performances from the likes of Chris Messina and Elle Fanning end up sinking as quickly as a dead body attached to a boulder in a river? There is seemingly never a clear answer as to how so many promising parts can come together to form a subpar whole, but with Live by Night the majority of as much seems to fall on the script never knowing exactly what type of story it wants to tell and as a result, the momentum of the pacing never finding its footing well enough to keep viewers invested. There is always more material in a novel than a two hour movie can handle and it seems rather than relay what was more or less the same story the source material was telling through the prism of a single perspective or theme that Affleck instead attempted to cram in as much of Lehane's novel as he could resulting in the film feeling more than overstuffed while still leaving the viewer hungry for more. When talking of adapting a book for the screen director David Fincher said, "The book is many things. You have to choose which aspect you want to make a movie from." It seems Affleck might have learned a thing or two from his Gone Girl director as this lack of a singular viewpoint is exactly what Live by Night is missing; delivering so many characters, ideas, and plot strands it's hard to care about any of them.