I don't do reviews.

God bless the people who review works of art and media for mass consumption, but I'm not one of them.

So this is not a spoiler-filled review of "The Equalizer," starring Denzel Washington and directed by Antoine Fuqua.

It's the result of the impressions left on me by the film.

Starring Denzel as the lone, ex-government agent Robert McCall, the film tells the story of how a Very Dangerous Man tries to live a life as a "normal person," but it's a lie. He's not a normal person and it was only a matter of time before that truth won out over his job at Home Mart.

In the original television series on which the film was based, Robert McCall was played by a Caucasian British actor named Edward Woodward. This time, the character is played by a Black man...

...and that's where the divergence begins, on a level beyond the superficial and immediately marketable.

A question that could, does, and will continue to keep presenting itself in American society by those who care to examine things from a cultural, statistical, or sociological standpoint is "What does it take for a Black man to achieve the same standing as a White man in America?" This is not about superiority of any kind, but it is about the truth that American society is not one of equality when it comes to men of color, and Black men in particular, for a number of reasons too long and hot-button to get into here.

The lack of the examination of that question is one of the various reasons the "Daredevil" film of years gone by did not convince me of the merit of its fictional world. Seeing the character of Wilson Fisk, The Kingpin of Crime, played by the now-deceased Michael Clarke Duncan, I was looking forward to seeing what it would take for a Black man to become such a formidable underworld figure. The question was never answered.

But I think, just maybe, director Antoine Fuqua examined the question underneath the basic story of Denzel's Robert McCall.

This man could not have just been a damn good agent who could kill people based on intensive training. He would had to have been an exceptional agent whose capacity for killing was the same as his capacity for breathing, because either a) he would have to compete against a number of non-POCs in the agency or b) he would have been considered expendable because he was a POC, and thus had to up his game to extraordinary levels to survive. So his manner of killing would neither be beautiful nor glamorous. It would be ugly and merciless. Brutal. The aftermath of it would be a statement unto itself. This is not the expertly-filtered violence by the now-deceased director Tony Scott, or the verite-style violence of "Bourne" franchise director Paul Greengrass.

For the most part, director Antoine Fuqua, a Black man himself, showed the violence in horrific detail. He did not shirk from it, nor have the film's dominant portrayal of it be super-stylized. There was even an emphasis on how long it takes McCall to commit such acts, as shown by his use of a stopwatch to time himself.

Sixteen seconds.

Eighteen seconds.

For any combat in one room, twenty-one seconds would be too much. Not good enough. Not the best.

This Black Robert McCall must always do his best. He's meticulous in every aspect of his life. He has to be.

Screenwriter Richard Wenk publicly stated that he did not write the script until he was aware Denzel would be playing the lead, so that fact influenced his approach to characterization.

This Robert McCall is not as heroic as the Edward Woodward version was in the '80s, with his trench coat and suit and tie and charm and cultured sophistication.

He does not have a wife and daughter, both of whom survive film after film, kidnapping after kidnapping, like a certain Mister Neeson and the fictional circumstances of his franchise.

He does not even have a romantic interest, like most action heroes in the history of cinema.

All he has is his small apartment, modest clothes, his job at Home Mart, and a collection of books.

What I saw was a film that answered the question "What does it take for a Black man to achieve the same standing as a White man?" by showing that he would have to be an expertly ruthless, efficient individual who is only at peace when he is doing that thing which he is excellent at doing.

We can overlay this on the Black man in America, who is expected out the gate to be one step behind the non-POCs with whom he is competing for the same jobs, the same opportunities, the same neighborhoods for residence, the same access by way of social strata.

He may have to be especially ruthless with his business acumen.

He may have to prove his abilities to a degree in which there is no room, whatsoever, for any doubt of what he can do.

He may have to be more aware of time, because he's fighting the tide of inequality and thus has less time than someone else to achieve the same goals.

But he'll likely have friends and allies and family to help him along the way.

Unlike Denzel Washington's Robert McCall, who had almost none of those things, and may be part of a collective narrative on the modern Black male hero.

One with a little truth under the cliches.


Joseph Phillip Illidge is the Head Writer for Verge Entertainment (www.verge.tv), a production company co-founded with Shawn Martinbrough, artist for the graphic novel series "Thief of Thieves" by "The Walking Dead" creator Robert Kirkman, and videogame developer Milo Stone. Verge has developed an extensive library of intellectual properties for transmedia development. Live-action and animated television and film, videogames, graphic novels, and web-based entertainment.

Joseph has been a public speaker on the subjects of race, comics, and politics at Digital Book World's forum, Digitize Your Career: Marketing and Editing 2.0, Skidmore College, Purdue University, on the panel "Diversity in Comics: Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Sexual Orientation in American Comic Books," and at the Soho Gallery for Digital Art in New York City.

His latest project is "The Ren," a 200-page graphic novel about the romance between a young musician from the South and a Harlem-born dancer in 1925, set against the backdrop of a crime war and spotlighting the relationship between art and the underworld. "The Ren" will be published by First Second Books, a division of Macmillan.

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