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 In the action thriller that opens in U.S. theaters Friday,
Denzel Washington plays McCall, an efficient, mild-mannered
employee at Home Mart, who also happens to have a past as a
trained killer and a way with tools.
"He's resourceful," the 59-year-old Washington told Reuters
while promoting the movie at the Toronto International Film
Festival earlier this month.
Washington thinks McCall did not even need a home improvement
store at his disposal.
"It could have been this room," he said. "There's plenty of
stuff ... your shoe, the chain around your neck, your hair, the
chair. You can do a lot of damage."
The two-time Oscar winner reunites with Antoine Fuqua, his
director from "Training Day," for which Washington won his best
actor statuette in 2002.
The film from Sony Corp's Columbia Pictures is expected to be
the top film at the North American box office this weekend, with
ticket sales of $35 million, according to Boxoffice.com.
"The Equalizer," based on the 1980s television series of the
same name, depicts a man with an innate sense of justice who
comes to the rescue of people in dire straits with no one to
turn to.
McCall moves through Home Mart with a Zen-like calm, working
hard and helping co-workers with their problems. At home,
however, he leads an austere life alone and suffers from
obsessive compulsive disorder and insomnia.
McCall spends long nights awake reading classics of literature
in a diner, where he comes to know a teen Russian prostitute
played by Chloe Grace Moretz.
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Her abuse at the hands of a Russian human trafficking ring yanks
McCall out of the simple existence he had sought following a
complicated life in the murky world of intelligence where he had
been a killer and suffered for it.
The unassuming Home Mart guy suddenly turns out to be an efficient
slicer and dicer of Russian thugs.
"I wasn't just interested in running around chopping up folks,"
Washington said.
"So we added this element of OCD in his ritual, of folding the
napkin, the tea bag and he had peculiar habits. So there is this
character journey."
McCall's main nemesis of the many menacing characters in the
underworld is Teddy, a Russian sociopath who comes from Europe with
a posh accent and fine suits, looking more like a chief executive
than a mobster.
"We wanted to make him methodical, elegant, give him a great deal of
charm, but mostly bring him into the inner psychological world,"
said Marton Csokas, the actor who plays Teddy.
McCall's determination to decapitate the organization takes him and
Teddy to the home improvement store in a tense half hour where much
of the store's inventory of lethal tools is deployed in their
face-off.
(Editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and Lisa Shumaker)
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