The Equalizer is a cold blooded affair, filled with brutal violence executed to precision, yet sorely lacking the emotional undercurrent needed to make the bloodshed worthwhile.

When will it end? When will our great leading men -Denzel Washington, Liam Neeson, Kevin Costner, etc - put down their guns & stop wasting their talents on mediocre movies?

For Washington his gallery of killing machines is plentiful. Perhaps his most notable is his Man on Fire protagonist Joyhn Creasy, a mysterious man-of-death willing to give his life to save the only thing he loves, a young girl abducted by the Mexican cartel.

The Equalizer features a very similar situation, only this time the girl is that always popular stock character of the prostitute (played by Chloe Grace Moretz, wasted) and the criminal faction is the Russian mafia.

Directing The Equalizer is Antoine Fuqua, who last collaborated with Washington on Training Day. Where that film saw Washington at his monstrous best (winning an Oscar in the process), The Equalizer features a much more subdued turn.

Indeed his character Robert McCall is an introspective man of stern discipline and almost cyborg like precision, exerting an exact formula into all things from how many times he folds his handkerchief, to how to kill a group of men under 30 seconds.

It's not exactly revealed how McCall got his abilities, nor how such a stealthily made killing machine became such a “people person”, with everyone from his co-workers to the owner of a local diner all taking a shining to him. After all, the ability to kill a man with a cork screw doesn't exactly qualify for “citizen of the year” honours.

Yet McCall becomes just that as an avenging angel of the streets, helping victims of crime & corruption with his lethal dose of justice. In the process Fuqua (who has delivered his fair share of violence in Olympus Has Fallen and Shooter) revels in the brutality of his violent theatre, which he portrays as deadly serious, yet in doing so tip-toes into that area of torture porn sadism.

That is certainly felt through the actions of the McCall character who not only dispenses with the violence, but also glorifies in it by eerily watching his victims die (usually as they choke on their own blood).

Excessive violence in genre cinemas has become the norm over the last two decades (or so). What has always separated those films where the violence worked from those films where the violence does not, was the stakes at play. What's motivating the hero to kill? Who is dying? What result will come from this bloodshed?

Try as it does, The Equalizer never establishes those stakes, nor that emotional undercurrent or highwire feeling of vengeance served bloody cold that was needed needed to make the whole enterprise of The Equalizer worthwhile.

All that's left is a cold, cynical exercise in violence. One would think that an actor of Denzel Washington's stature would be above such things.