The Equalizer is an action-packed movie that deals with a man who believes in doing everything that he can to help people who are in need of it. The movie revolves around Robert McCall, who has a mysteriously dark past for someone who helps people on a daily basis. As a way to help turn his life around, Robert tries his best to live a quiet new life that includes little to no sleep, reading constantly, working at Home Depot, and going to a small diner every day during the middle of the night. At the diner, he soon discovers a young girl named Teri, who has to deal with the manhandlng Russian mob that won't grant her freedom. Because Robert knows that he can do something about it and he has started to generate feelings for Teri, he decides to take on the mobsters head on. Robert soon takes himself out of self-retirement and enters a dangerous world that includes him taking down bad guys left and right to the point that he takes on the entire Russian mafia, helping his good friends from corrupted cops, and in the process, he begins to equalize the playing fields for those who are in a great need of justice.
 The Equalizer is an entertaining thriller that never ceases to show off Robert McCall's incredible skills at defeating bad guys. The beginning of the movie brilliantly sets up the rest of the movie and introduces the protagonist, as well as all of his little quirks, like having to rearrange his silverware at the diner into very specific areas and bringing his own tea bags. The middle of the movie marvelously progresses the movie along and introduces new conflicts towards the protagonist, which is a necessity. The enticing ending of the movie proves to be one of the movie's main highlights and includes Robert battling bad guys in fresh, original, creative methods that involve him using unusual objects and transforming them into effective battle weapons. This exhilarating end of the movie closes up all loose knots and concludes the movie wonderfully. 

 The Equalizer also greatly benefits from having Denzel Washington gift the movie with a tremendous performance that is a force to be reckoned with. He is definitely one of the movie's main highlights and is able to really become Robert McCall. When he's on screen, viewers can really tell the protagonist is deeply invested into helping others and can easily see the motivation for why he does his best to serve justice. 

 The Equalizer is also cool and intriguing for the fact that the movie isn't just about one villain. Although there's technically just one main bad guy, the movie has an entire mob worth of bad guys that Robert McCall must take down, making his battles all the more interesting, since he's doing his best to take down an entire organization as just one man. 

 The Equalizer has some truly outstanding one-liners that have some really powerful messages within them, perfectly-timed quotes, and a fair amount of hilarious jokes that are delicately placed throughout the dialogue to ensure that the movie's tone doesn't become overly-dark, but at the same time, the tone of the movie doesn't become too light, which allows the tone to be a nice mesh of different tones, helping to allow the movie to make audiences feel an entire spectrum of emotions.

 Even though viewers seem to truly enjoy The Equalizer, critics didn't seem to fall in love with the movie, but they did seem to feel some satisfaction. Rotten Tomatoes gave the movie a fair 60%, which isn't fantastic but certainly isn't terrible. Metacritic gave the movie a 57% that is about the same ranking as the score that Rotten Tomatoes gave it, helping to demonstrate that critics thought that the movie was alright but not anything spectacular. IMDb gave the movie an extremely solid 7.2/10, which is actually much better than it seems, since they're known for giving generally lower scores. An impressive 93% of Google users liked the movie, demonstrating that viewers seemed to find more satisfaction with the film than critics did. 

 The Equalizer is absolutely a movie that is worth watching, simply because it is entertaining from start to finish, has a superb performance from the great Denzel Washington, has clever action scenes, and gives a new outlook on what an avenging angel can look and act like.