Spike Lee's vibrant 'Highest 2 Lowest'

 

   Not many filmmakers would venture into territory that requires reimagining a film by the great master Akira Kurosawa. Korosawa’s 1963 High and Low, based on a 1959 novel by Ed McBain, may not be the director’s best film but it’s marked by troubling ethical questions and a daring approach that kept star Toshiro Mifune off screen for much of the movie's second half.

  Working from a screenplay credited to Alan Fox, director Spike Lee takes the dare, creating a vibrant  work that has been given a catchy altered title, Highest 2 Lowest. 

   The central question remains the same in both films: Will a wealthy businessman pay a ransom for a kidnapped kid? I won’t say more about the twist that  heightens the question's ethical dimensions. Know, though, that Lee sets his movie in the record business, building a story around David King (Denzel Washington), a successful record producer who may be aging out of the business that gave him fame, wealth, and power. 

  Early scenes take place in King’s jaw-droppingly chic Brooklyn penthouse, where he lives with his wife (Ilfenesh Hadera) and teenage son (Aubrey Joseph). 

  King’s apartment, which features art by important  Black American painters such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kehinde Wiley, serves as a testament to Black cultural expression and affluence. It's a home, to be sure, but it's also King's palace, the place from which he rules.

  The lofty security of King's apartment is disrupted by the policemen who arrive once the kidnapping is reported. John Douglas Thompson, LaChanze, and Dean Winters play the cops who coach a sometimes reluctant King about how to proceed with a life and $17.5 million of ransom money at stake. King needs the money to keep his company, Stackin' Records, from falling into hostile hands.

    Mifune’s character, by the way, jockeyed to purchase a controlling interest in a shoe company he had run for years, a much less glitzy endeavor.

   Jeffrey Wright provides strong support as Paul, King’s chauffeur and confidant, a widower who has had his bouts with the law but is dedicated to providing stability for his teenage son (Wright’s real-life son Elijah Wright), who happens to be best friends with King’s son.

  The motives for the kidnapping are intriguing. The vengeful kidnapper in High and Low was after money. In the new version, the kidnapper (A$AP Rocky) is an aggrieved rapper who calls himself Young Felon and who feels snubbed by King. 

  Sure, he wants money, but he also craves fame and notoriety, the whole showbiz spotlight.

   When the screenplay contrives to leave King’s apartment, Lee takes an enthusiastic dive into New York, setting an important scene (delivery of the ransom money) on a fast-moving subway train and staging a chase through a Puerto Rican Day street crowd where the Palmieri is playing. (Note: Palmieri died recently, leaving a gaping hole in the New York music scene.)

   The movie opens on a far different note. An original cast version of Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ from the musical Oklahoma plays on the soundtrack, a choice that adds to the burnished glow created by cinematographer Matthew Libatique, whose camera masterfully explores Manhattan as seen from King's balcony.

   Washington, who hasn't made a movie with Lee in 19 years, commands the screen. Although a crucial   decision made by King feels underdeveloped, Washington's scenes with Wright are compelling. 

   Ditto for a late-picture scene with A$AP Rocky. King tries to establish his rap bona fides with a quick-witted younger man who isn’t buying. I'd see the movie for that scene alone.

  Highest 2 Lowest works best as a showcase for highly committed performances from the main cast and for Lee, especially when the movie hits the streets of New York. Few of the supporting actors are given stand-out moments, and third-act thriller tension doesn’t always match the gravity of the material's moral concerns.

   Shortcomings aside, The Highest 2 Lowest proves consistently engaging, and it stands as a work that Lee has made his own, smartly altering the story Kurosawa told to give it fresh spin. Lee makes the movie resound with the energy he finds in his characters and in the city that sets a big stage for their drama and dreams.

A strong cast lifts 'The Piano Lesson'

  Members of the Washington family -- as in Denzel, Malcolm, and John David -- are playing a major role in preserving the literary legacy of the late August Wilson, at least on screen. It has been eight years since Denzel Washington directed and starred in Fences, but the deep connection between Wilson's material and the Washingtons continues.

    For the latest entry, The Piano Lesson, Denzel Washington serves as one of the film's producers. His son -- director Malcom Washington -- offers a screen version of The Piano Lesson, one of 10 pieces in Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle. 

  Ma Rainy's Black Bottom (2020), another play in the cycle, was directed by George C. Wolfe with Denzel Washington as one of the film's producers.

   Marked by inspired acting and richly colored cinematography, The Piano Lesson features John David Washington, the oldest of Denzel's four children, as Boy Willie, a young man who arrives in Pittsburgh during the 1930s with hopes of selling an elaborately carved piano that has become a prized family possession. 

   When Boy Willie's sister Bernice (Danielle Deadwyler) refuses to sell, a drama about memory, family history, and heritage begins to take shape.

 A strong supporting cast adds to the movie's richness. Samuel L. Jackson portrays Doaker, a family uncle who presides over the house where Bernice and her 11-year-old daughter (Skylar Aleece Smith) also live. They've become the northern branch of the family.

 Corey Hawkins plays Avery, a Pittsburgh man who wants to marry Bernice and establish himself as a local preacher. Michael Potts appears as Doaker's older brother, a former piano player and heavy drinker who adds jolts of live wire energy whenever he's on screen. 

  Adapted from Wilson's play by Malcom Washington and Virgil Williams, the movie uses a ghostly reminder of the Old South to symbolize the lingering oppression that the family tried to escape by moving north. It struck me as a bit too literal.

  This part of the play, complete with an exorcism, rattles the screen but doesn't go down easily. Attempts to open the confinement of an essentially  one-room drama are semi-successful.

   But Wilson’s strength, his ability to find characters who encapsulate and enrich depictions of Black American life remains and his themes (family tensions, crushed dreams) have broad reach.

   Malcom Washington's debut directorial effort gives a strong ensemble cast an opportunity to bring memorable life to Wilson's richly drawn characters. They take full advantage of it. So should we.*

*The Piano Lesson currently is available for streaming on Netflix.

‘Gladiator II’: More but not better

 

    I’d been looking forward to Gladiator II, hoping director Ridley Scott would deliver an epic-scaled movie that provided a healthy dose of sword-and- sandal escapism while paying homage to an idealized version of bygone Roman virtues: honor and strength. 

  What I experienced was a mixture of involvement and disappointment, a movie that prioritizes spectacle as it labors to refresh the structure of the original movie, which made its debut 20 years ago.

   Gone, aside from a few references in flashback, is Russell Crowe as Maximus, an obvious necessity prompted by the fact that Maximus died in the first installment. He's replaced by Paul Mescal as Lucius, who we first meet on the eve of the Roman siege of Numidia, a North African Berber kingdom.

    David Scarpa’s screenplay introduces Lucius as an adult who was taken in by North African "barbarians” (as the Romans refer to its non-Roman subjects) as a child. The Numidians are ripe for conquest by Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), a loyal Roman who’s devoted to imperial expansion and to the republican ways of the past.

    Early on, we get the whole Scott enchilada: big ships, catapulted fire balls, gory hand-to-hand combat, scaled walls, and flaming arrows. 

    It should surprise no one that the empire is evil. The cunning wickedness of Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus -- so important in the first movie -- has been replaced by Denzel Washington’s Macrinus, a conniving entrepreneur who owns and wagers on gladiators and angles to surpass those who belong to the senatorial elite.

    Returnees include Connie Nielsen as Lucilla, Maximum’s one-time lover.

   As if to differentiate this belated and somewhat boated sequel, two actors (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger) play callow brothers who rule the empire, providing dual helpings of cruelty. 

   Plenty of action, much of it set in the Roman Coliseum, follows as the movie ratifies its status as a collection of CGI thrills. Digitally created super-monsters battle gladiators. These include vicious creatures that look like a combination of rabid dogs and monkeys and a rhinoceros the size of a small building.

    At one point, the arena is flooded for a simulated naval battle conducted while man-eating sharks ply the shallow waters. 

   Though obvious, the word "overkill" leaps to mind.

   I won’t bother you with details about a plot that includes reasonably predictable elements that echo developments in first movie. In case it isn't already clear, I'll summarize: After Lucius' wife is killed in the battle for Numida, he's captured and taken to Rome, where Macrinus purchases him and makes him a gladiator.

    The principal performances are all up to snuff. Mescal rages and looks muscular, a man contemptuous of his origins but not entirely freed of them, even as he seeks his vengeance for his wife’s death at Roman hands. 

   Playing a man of conscience, Mescal’s presence is missed when he's not on screen. The movie needed  more of his weight.

   In what becomes the movie's stand-out performance, Washington brings Shakespearean stature to a man of wit and cunning.

   Nielsen acquits herself well as Marcus’ wife, a lady with a "secret" that’s eventually revealed but which is obvious from the start.

   Although many of the movie's characters are based on real historical figures, the minority of viewers who are versed in Roman history in the 200s, may blanch at inaccuracies. 

   Those aside, Gladiator II finds Scott putting himself through the required paces. His battle scenes serve as crowdpleasers, much in the way battling gladiators served the Roman yearning for bloody escapism.

  I found the movie — which unfolds over two and a half hours -- a somewhat mechanical attempt to highlight a checklist of themes: Roman intrigue, Roman debauchery, the Roman taste for spectacle, Roman stoicism in the face of doom, and a buffed version of Roman virtue.

   Put it all together and you have a movie that finds  captivating moments amid a scattered, unexceptional plot. Gladiator II can't replicate the sorrows of the first movie or reach its noble heights.

   As a long-time spectator in the entertainment area, I'll turn my thumb sideways and move on.

 

A stark and powerful 'Macbeth'

 

   The Tragedy of Macbeth is a film from a Coen brother.

    I put it that way because director Joel Coen takes on  Shakespeare with The Tragedy of Macbeth and, yes, it feels weird to talk about a film with the name Coen attached without following with the word "brothers."

    The result of Joel Coen's solo effort is visually striking, intense, and bursting with fury.

     Employing an old-time aspect ratio and cutting through dark swaths with paths of white light, Coen simplifies the movie’s environment while simultaneously amping up its power.

     He opts for minimal but suggestive design. A castle still feels like a castle — albeit one you might find in an Ingmar Bergman film.

     I begin there because what stayed with me about Coen’s movie was its atmosphere and visual poetry, the way Coen married Shakespeare and back-and-white imagery of cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel.

    Coen and his team allow Macbeth to strike its own pose. And I don't mean "pose" in a pejorative sense, I mean it the sense of a movie that has the power of a starkly drawn silhouette.

    Coen isn’t trying to make Macbeth feel “real;” he bends cinematic convention to allow Shakespeare’s story and language a place where tragedy gathers force.

    A grizzled Denzel Washington provides the centerpiece of the drama. Washington doesn’t underline the play's great monologues  ("Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow"). You won’t catch him orating; he delivers the dialogue as if it were his own speech.

    Washington's performance brims with emotional undercurrents, perhaps driven by the guilt that accrues to Macbeth as a result of killing his king (Brendan Gleeson) and then slaughtering rivals and their families. He even turns on his best friend and ally Banquo, a fine Bertie Carvel.

    Lady Macbeth (Frances McDormand) encourages Macbeth in his murderous ways, prompted by the king’s announcement that he plans to make his son Malcolm (Harry Melling) his successor. 

    Washington makes Macbeth's attitude less a matter of naked ambition than of reaction to a slight: Macbeth, who looks ready for an AARP membership, fought tirelessly for the king and never got his proper reward. If his anger has a modern equivalent, it's getting passed over for a promotion someone thought he had earned.

    All the actors rise to the occasion. Corey Hawkins makes a fine Macduff, perhaps the best and most human of the characters.

    Coen does a wonderful job with a bizarre and unforgettable performance from Kathryn Hunter as the witch who offers her prediction: Macbeth will be Thane of Cawdor and then king. Coen suggests the presence of Shakespeare's three witches by using a reflecting pool and adding ominous circling crows. 

   Hunter's performance is haunting enough to take the place of a half dozen witches, had Shakespeare wanted to increase their number.

   Coen’s Macbeth seldom finds itself idling and, thanks to a pared-down text, moves quickly toward a conclusion in which he makes it clear that, for him, Macbeth speaks loudly about dark forces that can be unleashed but seldom controlled.  

   This Macbeth screams when it needs to scream.

B-movie maneuvers with an A-list cast

    A thriller that evokes memories of other movies about cops and serial killers, The Little Things traffics in downbeat atmospherics with a thriller set in 1990s. 

   Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, and Jared Leto star in a story that has been vamped on and recycled so many times, it's difficult to see the movie as more than another genre exercise.

    Looking paunchy, exhausted and gray, Denzel Washington plays Joe "Deke" Deacon, a Northern California deputy sent to LA to retrieve a piece of evidence.  As it turns out, Joe once worked in LA, a city he couldn't escape without tarnishing his reputation.

    Once in LA, Joe teams with Jimmy Baxter (Rami Malek), an LA detective with a starched personality and a talent for getting himself on the news. Jimmy asks Joe to join him in trying to solve a string of murders, prostitutes who have been mutilated.

   Enter Albert Sparma (Jared Leto), an LA refrigerator repairman who lives on the margins, walks with a waddle and has enough smarts to make for a tough interview when the cops haul him in for questioning. 

     With long hair that looks as if it hasn't been washed for weeks and a taste for strip clubs, Albert has prime suspect written all over him.

     Washington has an uncanny ability to make us believe that any character he plays knows more than anyone else. He and Malek make a decent enough team, mismatched at first but increasingly on the same page.

     The screenplay creates a predictable thematic link between Joe and Jimmy, building a connection around each's capacity for moral compromise. Joe was suspended from the LA force because he became obsessed with a case that shattered his marriage and put him in the hospital for triple bypass surgery.

     Director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, Saving Mr. Banks) turns out a police procedural that peeks into the darkest corners of cop and criminal behavior -- not so much because it's curious but because the atmospherics demand it. 

     Even worse, the story falls short during the final act which finds Jimmy behaving  in ways that defy credibility. 

     The Little Things fulfills many of the requirements of a gritty genre piece, moving its characters through a world from which no one escapes uncorrupted, sort of a B-movie with an A-list cast and noir shading.

       But with three Oscar winners in the principal roles, it's not unfair to have expected something more.

      

Denzel Washington as a savant attorney

Roman J. Israel, Esq. makes room for moments that are so thought-provokingly enjoyable that the movie, which can't be called a success, may be more interesting than movies that would have garnered more praise. Denzel Washington creates one of his more memorable characters, a legal savant whose values and tastes are firmly stuck in the 60s. Washington's Israel sports an afro, baggy-ill fitting pants, and glasses a couple of sizes too big. Directed by Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler), Roman J. Israel, Esq. is at its best when it's focused on this misfit of a man whose heroes include Bayard Rustin and Angela Davis. A key story element arrives early: Israel has spent 36 years working for a famous lawyer. Israel has been the backroom brains for William Henry Jackson, an attorney who knew how to handle himself in a courtroom. Jackson suffers a heart attack and slips into a coma, igniting a plot that brings Israel into touch with a hot-shot attorney portrayed by Colin Farrell. Farrell's George Pierce has been asked to dissolve Jackson's firm, which -- unbeknownst to Israel -- has never turned a profit. Israel also meets a civil rights activist (Carmen Ejogo). She sees past Israel's strange behavior and finds a righteous man. The plot puts Israel into a position in which he must decide how righteous he really is, a development the movie doesn't seem to know how to explore. For roughly half of its two-hour and 9-minute running time, Roman J. Israel, Esq. complies scenes that don't quite cohere. It's almost as if Gilroy, who also wrote the screenplay, can't figure out precisely what he wants to say. He compensates by giving Washington some scorching dialog and with a bit of cinematic daring, even employing some throwback style to evoke a feeling of '60s cinema. Roman J. Israel, Esq. emerges on one of the year's true oddities, a film that stumbles but, before it falls, hits notes you're not likely to hear anywhere else.*
As was the case with Wonder, I had a conflict with the preview screening of Roman J. Israel, Esq. and caught up with the film after its opening.

Theatrical power drives 'Fences'

Denzel Washington directs August Wilson's powerful family drama.

Anger and irony always have informed Denzel Washington's best work, and in his adaptation of August Wilson's play Fences, Washington finds a character that's equal to his taunting, incisive intelligence and his unwavering commitment to finding the dramatic truth of every character he plays.

Washington played the role of illiterate garbage man Troy Maxson in a 2010 Broadway revival of Wilson's 1983 play that also teamed him with Viola Davis, who again joins Washington to play Troy's long-suffering and sometimes indulgent wife. Davis's Rose has lived with Troy long enough be wise to his wiles: A former baseball player, ex-convict and a deeply opinionated man, Troy's a definite handful.

Set in Pittsburgh in 1957, the movie provides a context for understanding Troy. He was a good baseball player whose career peaked before Jackie Robinson broke the Major League color line. He says he played with men so good, Robinson couldn't even have made the same team as them. He's an embittered man who can serve up a sharp, piercing grin -- the kind of smile that cuts as much as it warms.

Fair to say that Fences, which Washington also directed and which takes place mostly in the backyard of the Maxson family home, survives as a play on film, but that doesn't mean that its great theatrical moments are in any way muted.

Both Washington and Davis scale their performances somewhere between stage and screen, and in his role a director, Washington clearly keeps allegiance with the rapid-fire exchanges in Wilson's text.

The movie's economical opening shows Troy riding the back of a garbage truck with his co-worker and pal Bono (Stephen Henderson). Troy and Bono empty garbage cans along the route. We get a quick glimpse of the white man who's driving the truck. That's pretty much all we need to know about the racial hierarchy of the Pittsburgh sanitation department in the 1950s, although the subject does come up later.

Visual flourishes aside, Washington allows the power of the performances to carry the day, obtaining fine work from a supporting cast that includes Russell Hornsby as Troy's musician son from a previous marriage, and Mykeleti Williamson as a World War II veteran who suffered brain damage as a result of his war wounds. Williamson's Gabriel wanders the neighborhood, a trumpet tied around his neck with a frayed piece of rope. He's the movie's holy fool.

But the film's key male relationship involves 53-year-old Troy and his younger son Cory (Jovan Adepo). Cory is a high school football star with college potential. Troy holds the young man back, insisting that he step into a dutiful but limited role as a worker. Learn a trade, Tory insists.

Put another way, Troy wants his son to become him, a desire that's partly selfish but also fueled by Troy's certainty, honed by experience, that sooner or later, the white world will betray an ambitious black man.

Fences fits into the best tradition of American family drama, a story about characters who carry the burden of their personalities as well as of their times and who sometimes suffer from a potent merger of the two.

For all of Troy's cruelty, the movie gives him the integrity of his convictions, and what I carried from the theater was a sense of the indelible rage that Washington breathed into Troy and the ability of his beleaguered wife to match it and go beyond it to a place of acceptance.

Despite some cinematic stiffness, Fences emerges as a movie with a love of the characters who populate it and a deep understanding of what they all must do to survive. Both in front of the camera and behind it, Washington has made a powerful piece of work.

The Seven take another ride

Denzel Washington leads a diverse troupe of rogues in a remake of The Magnificent Seven.
 The late John Huston, a director with a resume that commands respect, once confessed to bemusement about Hollywood's approach to remakes. Why remake movies that worked, Huston asked? Why not have another go at movies that didn't make the cut? Maybe a fresh eye could figure out what went wrong.

Director Antoine Fuqua didn't follow Huston's advice. Instead, he tried his luck at an emphatic but not entirely stirring version of The Magnificent Seven in which Denzel Washington, who teamed with Fuqua on Training Day, took the role Yule Brynner played in the 1960 original.

Fuqua brings plenty of style to the project, but the movie's magnificent seven -- rogues who sign on to help protect defenseless farmers from a ruthless robber baron (Peter Sarsgaard) -- tend to be sketches rather than well-drawn characters.

As a result, the movie is only moderately successful in its attempts to write a rousing ode to brutal men who find redemption by helping to protect the helpless.

This version of the Seven story has been ethnically diversified for contemporary audiences. In addition to Washington's Chisolm, we meet a knife-throwing Asian (Byung-hun Lee), a cigar-chomping Mexican (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), an outcast Comanche warrior (Martin Sensmeier), a former marksman (Ethan Hawke) for the Confederacy, a bearish loner (Vincent D'Onofrio) and a tag-along novice (Luke Grimes).

Washington, Hawke and D'Onofrio receive the most attention; the others are reduced to embodiments of their skill sets. Good with knives. Not-to-be-messed, etc.

Washington's performance consists mostly of stoic minimalism. Dressed in black, he's the all-business member of the team. Perhaps that's why it falls to D'Onofrio's Jack Horn to sound the movie's theme: No man can ask for more than to serve his fellows in the company of men he respects.

Early on, Fuqua seems to be embracing genre cliches with gleeful relish. He has some fun with the scenes in which Washington's character rounds up the crew that will protect the decent people of the embattled town of Rose Creek.

Initially reluctant to get involved, Washington's Chisolm eventually responds to a request from a plucky woman (Haley Bennett) whose husband was gunned down in cold blood by Sarsgaard's Bogue. Bogue's capitalistic interests clash with the homespun agrarian virtues of the townsfolk.

Oddly, the movie begins to lose steam with its first gunfight, and the massive final battle sacrifices realism to non-stop pyrotechnics, including a vicious hail of bullets launched from a Gatling Gun that Bogue brings to the fight.

Cliches aren't necessarily a bad thing in a movie such as this, but by the time Washington straddles his horse as he fires one impossibly precise shot after another, the cliches have become ... well .... cliches.

Mauro Fiore's cinematography provides one of the movie's biggest pleasures: spacious landscapes, weathered faces, galloping horses. Even the town of Rose Creek -- though typically portrayed -- adds a welcome familiarity to Fuqua's Western adventure.

And the villain? Eli Wallach's Calvera from the original was more convincing than Sarsgaard's blandly ruthless capitalist. The endangered Mexican peasant farmers of Sturges's movie, of course, have given way to Rose Creek's predominantly white-bread population.

Composer Elmer Bernstein's trademark theme from Sturges's movie, hinted at throughout, provides a stirring coda for a drama that could have used that kind of punctuation throughout.

The Magnificent Seven isn't a bad movie, but there's something wrong when a movie's end credits feel more spirited than the scenes that immediately precede it.

And, no, neither the 2016 edition nor Sturges's movie surpasses the real inspiration for both films, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954), a true masterpiece.

A store clerk who' s really an avenger

Denzel Washington gets serious about taking out Russian mobsters.

Hardware store salesman by day. Avenger by night.

He's The Equalizer, the title character of a new thriller that reunites Denzel Washington with Antoine Fuqua, the director who guided Washington toward his best-actor Oscar in 2001's Training Day.

In The Equalizer, which is based on a 1980s TV show, Washington plays Robert McCall, a loner who works at a Boston big-box store called Home Mart. A believer in healthy eating and physical fitness, Robert helps an overweight co-worker prepare for a fitness test he must pass in order to become a security guard at Home Mart.

Health-oriented as he is, McCall is also an insomniac. He stays up all night, drinking tea in a 24-hour Boston diner and reading number 91 of the 100 great books he's set out to conquer.

Robert's monkish existence (as well as his reading of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea) is disrupted when he meets a young prostitute (Chloe Grace Moretz) who's been badly beaten by her pimp. Thus stirred, McCall's desire to protect the weak sets him on a course in which he tries to free the young woman from the tyranny of her vicious Russian mobster pimps.

In his battle with the Russians, McCall displays so much physical prowess we immediately know that he's no ordinary guy: After all, ordinary guys don't usually know how to push a corkscrew through an opponent's chin.

Later, we learn (as if we hadn't already guessed) that McCall's a former secret agent who's trying to live an anonymous life.

Washington wastes his gravitas and star power on a thriller that takes itself more seriously than it should and which culminates in an over-the-top battle in the Home Mart store, a series of deaths by hardware that's as gruesome as it is preposterous. Watch out for nail guns and power drills.

It's probably best not to think much about the social dynamics at work here. McCall is one of those disconnected characters who's trying to move through life without leaving traces.

The supporting cast tries to match Washington's intensity. Marton Csokas plays a sadistic Russian who has been sent to Boston to slow McCall's vengeful roll. Melissa Leo turns up in a small role as one of McCall's former associates, and, in what surely qualifies as the most thankless acting job of the year, Bill Pullman portrays Leo's husband, a true afterthought of a character.

The Equalizer probably will score big at the box office, but for my money, the movie traffics in the kind of revenge that works best when not presented in A-list, IMAX super-productions.

Washington's substntial presence pushes The Equalizer into the center ring, but the movie never really establishes itself as anything more than another over-amplified butt-kicker. And Fuqua's attempt to create a near-superhero -- while simultaneously maintaining an atmosphere of gritty urban realism -- hardly encourages plausibility.

Impressive as it is, McCall's vengeful spree doesn't prove emotionally satisfying. By the end, McCall's violence no longer express our collective outrage or our desire for moral balance: It's just what the man does.

'2 Guns:' watchable but empty

Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg have violent fun as reluctant allies.

Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg are the headliners in 2 Guns, a thriller about two reluctant allies who find themselves at odds with Mexican drug lords, the CIA, the DEA and just about any other individual or agency the screenplay decides to throw at them.

Warming to their buddy movie chores, Washington and Wahlberg more than hold their own, but the overly convoluted 2 Guns wallows in the dirt of governmental and criminal corruption without having much to say about either.

For all its attempts at winning the summer movie grit-stakes, 2 Guns stands as a lightweight drama punctuated by heavy gunfire, bursts of sadistic violence and familiar action elements such as car-crushing collisions and fiery explosions. The movie might have been better had it paid more attention to its title: Two guns would have been plenty.

As is often the case with this kind of thriller, we have to look to the supporting cast for additional color. Although he's playing a character who defies plausibility, Bill Paxton registers as a brutal CIA agent with a sadistic streak, a southern accent and a cowboy look. Edward James Olmos plays a drug kingpin who greets almost any situation with a world-weary attitude. He's like a drug-dealing grandpa who occasionally orders up a few murders.

Paula Patton is mostly wasted as a DEA agent who provides an opportunity for a sex scene.

Although, 2 Guns seldom proves boring, it's ultimately an inconsequential helping of action that comes equipped with car chases and gun battles that seem to function as safety devices, elements that feel as if they've been included to make the story palatable for summer audiences for whom seriousness is about as welcome as a case of West Nile Virus.

Director Baltasar Kormákur, who directed Wahlberg in 2012's Contraband, has has made a pseudo-adult movie in which scenes of considerable brutality have momentary shock value, but don't really add up to much of anything.

Watching Washington work is never difficult and Wahlberg certainly keeps pace, but 2 Guns feels awfully scattered. The movie tries to touch so many bases, it almost forgets what game it's trying to play.

Imperiled plane, imperiled pilot

Denzel Washington takes flight as an alcoholic airline pilot.

Flight -- the latest film from director Robert Zemeckis -- has all the markings of another Hollywood thrill ride. With Denzel Washington playing a commercial airline pilot, the movie seems headed for the kind of territory in which the steely expertise of a seasoned pilot saves an imperiled plane. You half expect an airborne version of Unstoppable, a terrific action movie in which Washington played an engineer trying to head-off a runaway train.

Although Flight features some of the most harrowing airborne sequences ever, it's as much about an imperiled life as an imperiled plane. From the opening scenes in a disheveled hotel room, it's clear that Washington's Whip Whitaker has a drinking problem that he tries to temper with head-clearing snorts of cocaine.

The story revolves around Whip's two lives: His life as a dissolute drunk and his life as a guy who believes he can leap from an alcohol-infused stupor to his highly demanding job without losing a step. It's the kind of confidence that comes from having done it before -- probably a lot.

But a flight from Orlando to Atlanta changes everything, and introduces some welcome moral complexity into Zemeckis's movie.

Whip is flying drunk when his plane experiences a grave mechanical failure. He's able to call on training and reflexes to deal with the situation, but there's no gainsaying his intoxication. He's a completely irresponsible hero who saves 96 of the plane's 102 passengers -- and does it without a miscue.

In a moment of extreme crisis, the captain in Whip takes command of the drunk, even to the point where Whip flies the plane upside down in order to slow its fall.

After its compelling opening and horrific crash-landing, the movie establishes itself as something else, the story of an addict whose ability to deceive himself and others is threatened by a National Transportation Safety Board investigation into the crash.

Washington -- who's now almost 58 and beefier than when he was younger -- gives a memorable performance as a man who has gone through a bitter divorce and seldom sees his teen-aged son. Whip has nothing going for him other than twined abilities: He can fly and he can lie.

The movie's early scenes introduce another character, a young heroin-addicted woman (Kelly Reilly) who, after an overdose, will meet Whip in the Atlanta hospital where he -- and the surviving passengers and crew -- are taken after the crash. For a time, Whip's life mingles with Nicole's at the family farm where Whip retreats to hide from the press.

I don't know if it was absolutely necessary, but a scene in which Whip, a cigarette smoker, meets Reilly's Nicole in the hospital is a real crowd-pleaser. Not because of anything Reilly or Washington do, but because of a monologue delivered by a cigarette-smoking cancer patient (James Badge Dale).

Clearly, this is Washington's show, although the supporting cast is quite good. John Goodman adds robust comic relief as a take-charge drug dealer, one of Whip's wayward pals. Don Cheadle plays the smart, amoral lawyer who's asked to guide Whip through his NTSB ordeal, and Bruce Greenwood portrays a long-time friend and union representative who's eager to turn attention away from pilot fallibility and onto failing equipment.

Washington's scenes with Cheadle are particularly interesting. As savvy as Cheadle's ("I can fix anything") character is and as wobbly as Washington's Whip becomes, Washington takes charge of every moment, never entirely letting go of Whip's defiance, bravado and percolating contempt.

Melissa Leo has a small but effective turn as an NTSB lawyer who wants to expose Whip for what he is.

Now, the movie is not without problems. It seems unlikely to me that a man such as Whip could hide his addiction from his employers. The movie suggests that others have served as Whip's enablers, but still. Moreover, the way in which the screenplay dispenses with the co-pilot's knowledge of Whip's condition struck me as far-fetched.

Zemeckis makes up for some of these problems with a agonizingly tense scene in which Whip -- in an attempt to straighten himself out -- tries to resist the siren call of a miniature bottle of vodka in a hotel mini-bar.

Back to live action after forays into animation with Polar Express and A Christmas Carol , Zemeckis doesn't flinch when it comes to showing alcoholic behavior. And I wondered whether the director of Forrest Gump and Back to the Future wasn't trying a little too hard to establish his hard-boiled bona fides.

Not to worry: After all the hard drama, Zemeckis brings the movie in for a soft landing with scenes that take some of the sting out of its previous tough-mindedness and which struck me as false.

Whatever its shortcomings, Flight benefits greatly from Washington's strength: Even when the movie falters, Washington's never anything less than riveting as a pilot whose life has spiraled out of control -- even while he's thinking that he's far too slick to land with a crash.

Sifting through the wreckage of 'Safe House'

This action-oriented blur of movie relies on Denzel Washington to hold it together.

A desk-bound CIA rookie comes into contact with some of the agency's more questionable practices. As a result, he begins to understand that the action for which he has been longing comes with a steep price, an acceptance of ethical expediency that can undermine anyone's humanity.

That kind of situation surely would make for an interesting movie. Unfortunately, Safe House -- which focuses on the relationship between a CIA novice (Ryan Reynolds) and a former agent gone rogue (Denzel Washington) -- is not that movie.

Safe House is a jumbled mishmash of action wrapped around a strained plot that's given a bit of extra cache by a strong cast that -- besides Reynolds and Washington -- includes Brendan Gleeson, Vera Farmiga, Ruben Blades, Sam Shepard and Robert Patrick, actors who, for the most part, are present without making a big impression. Most of the supporting cast hangs out in a media-heavy control room at CIA headquarters.

If you find the movie intermittently confusing, blame David Guggenheim's muddle of a script and director Daniel Espinosa's frenzied direction. Bruising car chases and vicious fights are spewed across the screen in fragmented, hand-held chunks that ape the visual incoherence of some of the set pieces in the Bourne movies and which seem to have become the fashion in too many editing suites. (Here's a quick, but helpful FYI: Richard Pearson, who did the editing here, also edited The Bourne Supremacy.)

Reynolds portrays Matt Weston, a CIA agent who’s working in a low-grade post in Cape Town, South Africa. Matt’s life changes when Washington’s Tobin Frost -- a former agent who has wandered way off the reservation -- surrenders at a U.S. consulate. Frost is brought to Weston’s safe house for interrogation sessions, which include water boarding.

As the interrogators ply their morally dubious trade, the safe house is attacked by an unidentified group of invaders, a development that puts Weston and Frost on the run. Weston's supposed to keep Frost safe so that he can be questioned and prevented from doing further harm to the agency and to the U.S. interests its supposed to protect.

The rest of the movie proceeds in an action-oriented blur. Reynolds functions as a kind of straight man to Washington, who delivers another wily performance as a savvy, manipulative sociopath who knows every trick in the book. Why not? He seems to have helped write it.

At one point, Frost overpowers Westen and puts a gun to his head; he spares the young man's life while simultaneously insulting his prowess. Frost says he only kills professionals. It's tough to top Washington when it comes to thee kinds of obvious "power" moments, but I found myself hoping he soon finds a script that's challenging in a totally different way.

The pounding pace of Safe House doesn't allow much time for reflection. That’s a good thing because the action can be as puzzling as it is improbable, all of it undergirded by the predictably cynical notion that the CIA is as devoted to treachery and betrayal as it is to gathering useful intelligence.

Safe House could have benefited from more useful intelligence itself. Instead, the movie coasts on pre-digested attitudes, Washington’s undeniable appeal and lots of punishing action. Before it's done, just about every character in Safe House takes some sort of beating. So, finally, do we.

A movie that's on track for tension

Unstoppable may not change your life, but it provides a solid 98-minutes of white-knuckle escapism.

Chris Pine and Denzel Washington as men at work.

Tony Scott's Unstoppable barrels its way onto a large number of screens this weekend. In some parts of the country, Unstoppable opens against 127 Hours, director Danny Boyle's hyper-kinetic look at the harrowing, real-life experience of Aron Ralston, a young Coloradan who liberated himself from a Utah canyon by cutting off the lower part of his right arm.

I normally avoid reviewing one movie in terms of another, but I mention Unstoppable and 127 Hours together because both are designed for visceral charge and both are worth seeing. When it comes to end-of-the-year honors, though, it's a good bet that Boyle's festival-launched movie will fare better than Unstoppable.

Too bad. Unstoppable may not win many awards, but it does offer 98 minutes of heart-stopping escape. And unlike, 127 Hours, Unstoppable isn't burdened by even the slightest hint of pretension. Scott's movie clearly intends to provide a solid hunk of white-knuckle escapism -- and does.

Unstoppable reunites Scott with Denzel Washington, an actor he directed in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009), Deja Vu (2006), and Man on Fire (2004). Unstoppable - a movie about a runaway train - marks the best of the Scott/Washington collaborations, a high-speed hunk of action that builds furious momentum.

Washington plays Frank, an engineer who has made a living hauling freight around the Pennsylvania countryside. A 28-year railroad vet, Frank is teamed with a newcomer to railroading (Chris Pine of Star Trek fame). A cost-conscious company has been pushing its older workers into early retirement, so the grizzled pros tend to resent novices such as Pine's Will.

Looking a little portly, Washington proves entirely convincing as an engineer who has lived a reasonably successful blue-collar life, raising two daughters as a solo dad. This being a Tony Scott movie, it should come as no surprise that Frank's daughters are hot young women with jobs at a local Hooters. They provide a modest splash of eye candy.

Will is married, but his marriage has hit a rough patch, the kind of troubled stretch that leads to restraining orders.

Blue-collar romanticism chugs through the movie. When the chips are down, Frank's hands-on experience trumps management's preoccupation with the bottom line. Frank ultimately devises the best plan for stopping a train that's racing toward catastrophe with no driver, no brakes and an engine that's fully powered.

And did I mention that the runaway train is carrying a highly toxic and combustible chemical that's used in the manufacture of glue? The runaway train becomes a monster unleashed on a rural landscape that's dotted with small and medium sized towns. The train's "a missile the size of the Chrysler Building,'' as one character puts it.

Unstoppable was inspired by a real 2001 incident, but a faithful rendering of events is not the point here. Scott knows that his job is to create high tension, and he never lets up.

He also augments the proceedings with tasty small performances. Ethan Suplee plays the engineer who stupidly jumped off his train to reset a switch, thus causing the runaway. Rosario Dawson portrays a railroad traffic manager who tries to prevent disaster, and Kevin Dunn appears as a railroad boss, an executive motivated by dual concerns: safety and profit. Well, maybe more profit than safety. Lew Temple plays another railroad employee, a guy who chases after the runaway train in his pick-up.

Screenwriter Mark Bomback doesn't seem to have spent much time fretting over the dialog, but he sustains a nearly unbearable sense of peril by presenting us with an escalating series of potential disasters.

Unlike an awful lot of contemporary movies, Unstoppable makes good on its promise. And happily, it doesn't depend on gunplay or explosions. Scott finds danger, excitement and heroism in a movie that knows precisely where it's headed, and takes us along for one of the season's most nerve-rattling rides.