Denzel Washington squares off with his greatest adversary in a restaurant scene that showcases the power of action films and why they will always matter.
One of the craziest, most rewarding joys of being 50+ years old in 2025 is indulging in movies where a bad-ass dude funnels our collective frustration into dispersing justice to all who deserve it. Fuck yes! Our current action films remain rife with this plotline, all of us just pretending not to notice how much we crave seeing evildoers punished by the righteous and what that says about our current political situation.
I think of John Wick and Taken and Nobody, each featuring fight scenes and catharsis so potent that they approach sexual levels of release. We want to be the impossible badass with secret skills that are summoned forth from a place of damnation. We want to walk the fine line between living our little life and flicking our wrists to disarm fake tough guys.
Forget James Bond – we’ve long since outgrown the bon mots, tuxedos, and exotic locales. No, our current enemies don’t have volcano lairs or entire armies at their disposal – they sit next to us on buses and subways, they party in clubs, they take refuge in rundown apartments. We don’t need Rambo’s M-64s with chains of golden ammo necklaces – all we need is a fucking pencil or a corkscrew. Scour your junk drawer for the next instrument of death.
Wick might have a cache of weapons and perfect aim, but he’s a member of a secret society – another cool-as-fuck motif that proves we all realize something hideous is happening to our country under the surface.
Villains don’t use these anymore
Vigilante Films
Vigilante justice films are nothing new, but they didn’t hit like this before. Maybe because our culture wasn’t in as dangerous of a place? I mean, we used to believe that justice would prevail. No longer. People went nuts over lo-fi trash like Death Wish (1974), but that was more about the common man taking down individual criminals who he couldn’t understand. We understand all too well, now. Our modern vigilantes are professionals taking down entire systems. The rot is embedded, part of our culture. We’re used to it, and so, so tired.
On the other end of the spectrum, think of a film like Falling Down (1993), where crazy ex-defense worker Michael Douglas freaks out on some old dudes on a golf course or in a McDonald’s that won’t serve him breakfast at two minutes past 10:30. Incels and the like now identify with the cheap frustrations exploited here, but what these embarrassing stains don’t see is that Douglas is clearly the bad guy in the film. He’s not to be admired. He’s a pitiful figure. He punches down.
The makers of our current action crop understand the psychological pickle we’re in, and they’ve crafted our frustrated heroes accordingly. We’re losing our battles, and our safeguards don’t work. The rich and powerful can do whatever they want. Hell, at some point, someone is going to make a film about an everyman who comes after CEOs – oh wait, you see what I did there? Yeah, we’re in it up to here.
But how can those of us not pushed that far yet channel this outrage? In Taken, John Wick, and Nobody – we can live out the fantasy. Bob Odenkirk punches his flabby brother-in-law in the office or beats the shit out of thugs in a bus (one of the greatest fight sequences ever put on film, from Nobody) and we cheer. Because we know there are people out there beyond redemption. It’s time to deal out what they deserve, and we’re getting to the point where we don’t care about the aftermath. After all, the bad guys don’t, right? This is a dangerous place to be.
The Russians Are Coming? They Never Left
Speaking of bad guys, Russians show up big nowadays in our action films like they did back in our ’80s heyday. But this time they aren’t parachuting into our schools and forcing Patrick Swayze and his gang to shout “WOLVERINES” from the mountaintop.
Our modern action film foes are more likely than not some kind of Russian mobsters (or tangled, impenetrable business interests like in Taken) that have already infiltrated our institutions from within and walk among us. (Sound familiar?) In real life, it’s not quite so cut and dried even though the Russians are still key players in our societal failure. The bigger question/problem in our lives now is that the real bad guys happen to be Americans – something none of us saw coming although we should have realized the kind of money, greed, and power this nation was founded on would come back to destroy us.
While Russian bots spam our comment sections and try to turn the political tide with bribes and blackmail, we look around us at the very real symbols of our broken republic: bumper stickers, flags, red hats, and the people we thought we knew, the people we’ve given chances to. We thought they could be redeemed, but they keep making the wrong decisions, never learning, never comprehending that they have the power within them to make it right.
In the best of these new-look action films, The Equalizer (2014), we get to take revenge on Russian mobsters who traffic underage girls and work alongside corrupt cops. I tell you, the scripts write themselves.
Through all of this our hero has enough integrity to give the bad guys a choice: Will they do the right thing? What do you think? It’s a subtle way of shifting the blame back to them when the inevitable throat rips occur.
We’ve had conversations with our families and friends about why they’ve chosen this path, and they’ve given us their disappointing answers, usually some garbage about God and country and brown people. Crushing the mobsters in movies like this helps us metaphorically work through the pain of seeing our high school friends reveal themselves to be racist hooligans who suddenly see nothing wrong with Vladimir Putin.
The Equalizer As Fantasy
In The Equalizer, Denzel Washington plays the titular role, and he’s just an everyday dude managing a Home Depot-like place when he happens upon a young hooker who is obviously in danger. Well, now, it’s his masculine duty to rescue the fair maiden. Funny though, the violent purge ends up being less about the girl and more about getting permission from our mother figures (Melissa Leo as Denzel’s former CIA boss) to lean into our natures and bring down the thunder, to be a men who can’t help themselves. Forget all these feelings and debates and reasonings. They’ve led us nowhere. Let’s fight fire with fire.
It’s a ridiculous fantasy but the feeling isn’t fantastical at all.
You ever get cut off in traffic or get yelled at in a meeting or fall behind on your bills even though you’re working 60 hours a week? How many times over the course of a lifetime can you take it when everything you are supposedly working for is now out of reach? The Equalizer posits that there’s nothing wrong with a little vengeance because God or the government isn’t going to do anything about it. We must be our own heroes. We must dig deep and make difficult choices about moral imperatives.
Of course, the only thing most of us can do – scared to death as we are of economic ruin and untrained in body-destroying martial arts – is to soak in films like this to satisfy the bloodlust. So be it. The Equalizer works because viewers can playact as someone who is effective and honorable, and we can pretend that there are others out there like us, that maybe someone might come and save us after all.
Movie magic continues to show us the way things should be. As long as someone out there believes that, we have hope. Hey, it works better than voting.
The Restaurant Scene
Without examining the entirety of The Equalizer, let’s focus instead on one specific scene: The restaurant showdown between Russian mafia hatchet man Nikolai and Robert McCall, a paragon of virtue played by Denzel, a paragon of virtue.
Guys, it’s so much better than the bullshit scene between Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in Heat, like miles better. I mention it because that classic scene is clearly an inspiration here. By the time Heat hit theaters in 1994, both Pacino and DeNiro had been swallowed up by their respective tics, and both actors seem to be doing impressions of themselves. Although hyped at the time, the scene shows Pacino and DeNiro to be spinning their wheels, and it hasn’t aged well at all. It’s the kind of poseur garbage masculinity that tells a tired tale about the world weariness of good guys and bad guys who share similar characteristics. Fuck that. We’re beyond readings on the so-called honor of being a scumbag. There isn’t any. Not when we’ve seen what real villains can do.
Denzel’s world weariness comes from a place of pure heroism, no matter how many people he’s killed in hidden corners of the globe. We get the feeling that they had it coming. That’s true exhaustion because he knows modern heroism is out of reach for most of us. DeNiro and Pacino have both been better in countless other films. They’ve played these roles before. They have nothing new to say. By contrast, the actors in The Equalizer have never been better, and they say everything.
Anyway, Nikolai is an irredeemable killer with a penchant for sadism, but he’s gained respect for McCall, who is, of course, an ex-CIA operative with a certain set of skills. We see cracks in Nikolai’s façade – he’s met his match. He’s never been in this position before. He turns down a call from his boss as he swirls his cognac. We see his fish dinner with a fork poking through it. He was toying with his prey, but now he’s being toyed with. How is he going to kill his way out of this one? And then, boom, McCall is there in the opposite seat in this plush restaurant you and I could never get reservations for, carrying bloody glasses from a henchman he killed in the john five seconds before.
Look at the stillness of this scene, these actors. This is what a menacing showdown looks like on film. This quiet meeting reveals both men at their most human – not because of their vulnerability (which Nikolai manages to convey) but because they have merged themselves with the roles they’ve dedicated their lives to. It happens to all of us. McCall has a softer side, a human protector side, but we realize that he’s truly the angel of death with an engaging smile. He regrets that he must bring out the darker side of his nature, but, you see, Nikolai has made him do it. And you know what? I actually buy the line of cliched crap that he promised his dead wife he wouldn’t destroy the world anymore. Dead wives, divorced wives, broken families, and emasculated men who need to reclaim their thrones are big in these films.
Denzel, who has perfected the stoic badass screen persona, does more than perform an impression of himself. He seethes with a casual resignation, not rage, and he gets his point across in a way he never did before – and that says something in a career filled with forceful performances. He doesn’t seem high and mighty or perfect, even though he barely makes a mistake in the film. Denzel makes us believe this outrageous character could exist. That’s his gift. He might be “Denzel” in every film, but you always buy it. He performs as if it’s the most serious thing in the universe. It’s a magic tightrope without a hint of satire. Denzel shows us we aren’t foolish to want things to be black and white.
As good as Denzel is in this scene, with his matter-of-fact murmured threats wrapped around a stunning story that reveals he knows everything about Nikolai, it’s New Zealand actor Martin Czokas who does the heaviest work. He gives us tantalizing glimpses behind the mask. Just like McCall, he’s not pretending to be this awful person, this is just who he is, and he’s fine with that. We see this kind of sociopathy all the time now, and wow, does Czokas nail it. There is no moral ambiguity, no insipid “we’re not so different, you and me” speech you find in Heat and every James Bond film. Instead, Nikolai discovers fear in real time. It’s being forged in the crucible of this conversation.
The micro-expressions Czokas employs in this scene are textbook definitions of superior film acting. Notice his subtle head bobs, shrinking and expanding smiles, the glimpse of shadows behind his eyes. He tries the old “You think you know me” schtick, but Denzel doesn’t play along, so he just sits and takes it, losing ground with every swallow, every shift of his scalp. He’s never met an immovable object like this. And so, at the end, when Denzel turns the question around (“What do you see when you look at me?), Czokas has erased his smug grin and replaced it with thin lips that betray the truth that the body always knows: he’s fucked.
Denzel shoves the pair of bloody glasses in his drink and walks away, leaving Czokas to ponder his inevitable death.
The Aftermath and The Purpose of Art
Acting like this leaves me breathless because it beautifies ugly emotions that we can’t express in everyday life. It swishes them around in the mouth. Showing this kind of emotion to your friends and family rightfully labels you a crazy person, so we express it through art, music, or in movie scenes featuring actors who have turned playing dress-up into some kind of elevated art. Both actors know how silly a scene this is on the surface, but they also know that we need it. You get the sense that Denzel and Czokas, if just for a moment, fought through a veil and figured out the true beauty of fantasy and pretend: They get to relish in all the things the frustrated everyman wants to say, all the things we want to scream about the laws and inequities in our society, the sadness, the awfulness at our cores that we can’t escape.
Czokas and Denzel lock in on each other, the proverbial predators circling before the strike, but there’s more than that. Their exchange hints at endless scenarios and experiences, things hidden away that only come out through simple glances and gestures, movements of napkins and pens, the act of leaning back or sitting forward. Everything means something. The anti-intellectuals among us in charge now would scoff at this, but that’s because they have no critical thinking skills. The scene is studied, serious, and shows an amazing amount of empathy for our entanglements and struggles.
Another cool thing is that McCall doesn’t respect Nikolai as an adversary. He pretty much tells him there’s nothing he can do about this, and Nikolai’s whole life has been a waste. It’s devastating. I love this because McCall doesn’t fuck around and give this man dignity. He’s going to kill Nikolai like a dog. And in Denzel’s performance we see a commitment to the power of human language. We see purpose and clarity.
I wish Czokas had been recognized for his performance in some official way. Or maybe it would be cool if Denzel and Czokas had had a few more scenes together or got reunited in some other film. But see, I want to feel the thrill again. We’re never just content with what we have, thus all these sequels that dilute the original.
I think about McCall and Nikolai’s first meeting earlier in the film in the apartment hallway, Nikolai presenting with a New York accent as he impersonates a detective. The two’s chemistry is so potent that when Denzel squares up with him and repeats “We who?”, I feel a testosterone frenzy that makes me tingle. What must it be like to live this fearlessly, if just for five minutes?
We have to find something productive to do with these feelings – whether it goes into working out or focusing on some kind of hobby or, I don’t know, protest? The problem nowadays, though, is we can’t have nice things. Instead, we get MAGA losers and people caught on phone vids trying to be badasses in grocery stores because they’ve got a mandate. That’s the danger but also the litmus test: Living vicariously through art can heal us, drain those energies, and help sharpen our synapses.
Those who don’t have the ability to filter scenes like this inevitably act them out and redefine who justice is supposed to be for: Newsflash, they think it’s for themselves because the non-whites have taken something from them. It’s not irresponsible that these films continually test us and glorify violence. (Throw video games, books, and music in there, too.) If we read them right, if we enjoy them on a psychological level, we can let that ugliness loose in productive ways and then search for the kind of real-life justice that doesn’t let the bad guys off the hook. This is what action movies are for and why good ones will always matter. They light up the pleasure centers in our brain, release the flood, and make us contemplate why we feel so good.
But The Equalizer isn’t an action film, it’s a fucking document of our current psychological predicament with two actors who understand the assignment. Spend an afternoon on YouTube watching all of Denzel’s best action/revenge moments throughout The Equalizer trilogy, and you’ll find yourself giddy, transformed. In those moments of revelation, we can discover how to unlock tougher versions of ourselves for everyday tasks. Or for whatever bigger thing is coming.