For the week of December 30th, Sony Home Entertainment is bringing director Antoine Fuqua's The Equalizer to Blu-ray. This reimagining of the cult 1980s TV show stars Denzel Washington as Robert McCall, a home-improvement-store worker whose unassuming demeanor hides something far more lethal: he's a former government agent who specialized in wetwork, and that skill set gets reactivated after McCall intervenes in the life of a troubled young woman (Chloe Moretz) and finds himself facing the wrath of a terrifying Russian mobster (Marton Csokas). Expectations were high for this one, and not without reason; the last time Fuqua and Washington got together, the result was the crime drama Training Day, which won Washington a Best Actor Oscar and helped kick off a whole spate of corrupt-cop procedurals (Shawn Ryan's masterful TV epic The Shield, for example, owes a great debt to Training Day). The problem is, at its best The Equalizer doesn't come close to what Training Day had to offer, nor does it even rank alongside some of Washington's more traditional thrillers. Anyone expecting another Man on Fire is going to be sorely disappointed. There's no inkling of greater nuance or spirit in The Equalizer, and while its lack of ambition isn't necessarily a fault, its rote approach to action and violence certainly is - The Equalizer plays like a late-period Charles Bronson programmer, with moments of graphic, ugly brutality acting as the sole reprieve from the long stretches of functional exposition and unconvincing theatrics. Washington tries his best to ground his character in something resembling normal human behavior, but at the end of the day, he's just playing a righteous cipher, and no amount of dry understatement and references to classic literature (his Robert McCall is an insomniac who's always reading books that just happen to thematically pertain to his own life) can give this action hero any real depth. Still, at least Washington comes out of this thing with his dignity – Moretz is patently unbelievable as a hardened teen prostitute, and Csokas chews so much scenery as The Equalizer's repellent Big Bad that one worries he's going to start gaining weight. The biggest offender is Fuqua, unfortunately. The best I can say for his work behind the camera is that he makes The Equalizer look good, although having Academy Award-winning DP Mauro Fiore at the ready probably doesn't hurt (unlike Fuqua's chintzy hit thriller Olympus Has Fallen, The Equalizer looks like a real movie rather than an excuse to get Louisiana tax credits). But his sense of pace is all off. Ultimately, he's making a popcorn thriller, but at almost two-and-a-half-hours long, The Equalizer lumbers along like a more somber affair, except that Fuqua's staging of the action scenes is so needlessly gory that we can't take it seriously. For all its grit, the most bracing thing about Training Day was its fleetness, the fact that we got swept along in the wake of Washington's Alonzo Harris just as much as Ethan Hawke's green trainee did, and Fuqua would have done well to have pitched The Equalizer at that same propulsively compelling rate.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman took a different opinion of the material, writing that "though Washington and Fuqua don't recapture the same magic from their Training Day time together, their latest collaboration is nevertheless of high quality, a full, satisfying entertainer of the darker variety that in many ways, then, reflects the grit and seediness of Training Day but here with more readily defined heroes and villains. While Training Day played in gray areas that slowly evolved to a more clear delineation of right and wrong, The Equalizer's heroes and villains are made known from the outset, and that separation, in this case, makes the movie one that the audience can get behind right away in a classic good-versus-evil story. At the same time, though, The Equalizer plays around with themes that don't push away the moral clarity but that instead give shape to it, that give the hero a purpose beyond raw vigilantism or standing up for the little guy, so to speak. Ideas on one's place in the world and an individual's shaping through past experience are explored in metaphor and are presented as the driving forces not so much behind McCall's remarkable ability to dole out justice but instead as moral justifications for a violent response to violence, even if it spins out of control and turns into a bloodbath well beyond his initial contacts with wrongdoers. The movie, then, isn't very remarkable on the surface, playing with simple themes that have played central before, but Washington and Fuqua add a depth to the main character that so often feels missing in other, similar pictures."
From Lionsgate comes Tusk. Director Kevin Smith freely admits that the inspiration for this bizarre horror-comedy does not come from his own febrile imagination – during "The Walrus and the Carpenter," one of his popular SModcast episodes, Smith and his producing partner Scott Mosier riff off a strange Craigslist-style roommate ad wherein prospective tenants get free room and board...provided they're willing to spend part of their days dressed in the full-size walrus costume for the benefit of the landlord. Smith later learned that the post was a fake, but something about the idea took root, and he took to Twitter in order to poll his fans as to whether or not he should make a movie inspired by that podcast conversation. That's right - Tusk exists, in part, because enough people retweeted #WalrusYes, and the craziest part is, for its first thirty or so minutes, this ridiculous gamble seems like it's going to work. As Smith's hero, self-centered podcaster Wallace Bryton (Justin Long), sinks deeper into the machinations of deranged psychopath Howard Howe (Michael Parks), Howe's strong affinity for walruses takes us to some places we're not expecting Smith to go. Smith has dabbled in horror before – the dispiriting, violent polemic Red State - but not with such hideous abandon, and the easy, Mamet-lite banter between Wallace and Howe quickly gives way to a creeping, Cronenbergian sense of dread and body horror. It helps, too, that Tusk is easily Smith's best-looking picture: DP James Laxton gives the widescreen images a lush, burnished touch that often belies the microbudget Smith had to work with. However, Smith's never been able to leave well enough alone (how else to explain the presence of Jay and Silent Bob in Dogma, or the pornography jokes in his otherwise family-friendly Jersey Girl, or Michael Rooker's whole character in Mallrats, or the musical number in Clerks II, or the presence of Jay and Silent Bob in Chasing Amy…you get what I'm saying), and no matter how tense the film gets when it's just Wallace and Howard, Smith keeps cutting away from that grisly action and destroying the forward momentum of Howard's ghoulish plan. Smith edited Tusk himself, and maybe that's why no one ever told him that audiences wouldn't care at all about the search party led by Wallace's girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez, who's very pretty and nothing else) and best friend (a hammy, unconvincing Haley Joel Osment), or the endless flashbacks that paint Wallace in the most unforgiving light possible so that we'll view his mental and physical despair as some kind of just desserts. That said, worst of all is the extended cameo from one of the biggest stars in the world; Smith clearly only had this person (whose name I won't spoil) for a couple of days, and he includes seemingly every bit of usable footage shot, although I hesitate to write "usable" because a) Smith's otherwise fine sense of direction and aesthetics suddenly becomes flat and nondescript during these scenes, and because b) this part is, bar none, the actor's single worst screen performance, a mélange of crappy makeup, stupid voices, and physical tics that are aiming for a French-Canadian Quint but end up more like the single worst Mike Myers-type character ever committed to celluloid, and yes, I've seen The Love Guru. It all culminates in a jaw-droppingly stupid finale that tries to mix grindhouse thrills and genuine sentiment and ends up belly-flopping at both of them, and that's after ruining Fleetwood Mac's spooky, disturbing song of the same name and including a borderline-offensive reference to Martin Scorsese's great The Last Temptation of Christ. In interviews for the film, Smith talks about how the film's freewheeling development process helped reinvigorate his love of filmmaking. Too bad that feeling isn't mutual. Tusk is such a shambling wreck that I can't believe he's really that invested in it, and even if Smith does care about this odd, off-putting mess, he's in a camp of one.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted that "there's no doubt that Tuskhas a creepy, even sinister, vibe, but it's also too piecemeal to ever really work up much momentum. The film is perhaps fatally hobbled by what should be its standout horror allure, namely the walrus 'suit' itself. While unforgettable in its own peculiar way, the rubber appliance may actually provoke laughter instead of shock, minimizing any latent fear factor that may be simmering. Smith's sense of humor is famously askew (hmm...), but he doesn't really seem to be going for laughs in Tusk, a decision that some may find hard to reconcile with the whole walrus angle. The film does offer yet another fantastic showcase for Parks, who has managed to make his golden years a compendium of sorts of odd, often menacing, characters. Long is fine if kind of bland as Wallace. For all of Smith's insistence that Tuskis an out and out horror film, it never really works up many outright scares, coasting instead on an almost subliminal feeling of dread. Perhaps not unexpectedly, this is a kind of post-modern take on various horror tropes, filtered through Smith's piquant if not always totally focused sense of expression. There's anxiety aplenty in Tusk, but ultimately surprisingly few chills."
Finally, Warner Bros. is bringing the fourth season of Showtime's Shameless to Blu-ray. At first, this dramedy was a simple Americanization of the popular UK soap of the same name, but like the U.S. version of The Office, the new iteration grew into its own unique beast: a profane and alternatively hilarious/emotional look at the Gallagher clan, a hardscrabble family living hand-to-mouth in the slums of South Chicago. Yet it's the darkness that makes Season Four so striking, and for the first time, showrunners John Wells and Paul Abbott weight their dramedy equation far in favor of the "drama" side. In previous seasons, the Gallaghers have bested tough situations through pluck and sheer grit, but now, their luck's running out. Eldest child – and de facto matriarch – Fiona (Emmy Rossum, who's effectively demolished her initial ingénue stereotype with her work here) finally has a steady-paying job, but her self-destructive habits put it at risk, and we suspect those habits might be genetic; how else to explain the connection from Fiona to the downward spiral of her father Frank (William H. Macy, in a performance that's all the more brave for how little it courts audience sympathies), an alcoholic whose recent dire health prognostications do little to curb his massive drug and alcohol intakes? In both instances, we keep waiting for genre convention and formula to offer a last-minute reprieve for these characters, except Wells and Abbott never blink and instead chart Fiona and Frank's troubles through some grim places. And the rest of the Gallaghers get dragged through the mud, too, whether it's the rude awakening that eldest son Lip (Jeremy Allen White) gets when he enters college, the relationship woes of youngest daughter Debbie (Emma Kenney), or – most tragically – the psychological traumas of middle child Ian (Cameron Mongahan). In no way is Season Four an easy sit (ironically, when Showtime submitted Shameless for awards consideration this year, it did so as a comedy – previously, its designation was as a drama, but it kept getting upstaged by prestige series like Mad Men or Breaking Bad), but it also proves uncommonly compelling. Wells and Abbott do such a full job of representing their urban milieu (much of the show is shot on location), and the acting is so tremendous (especially from Rossum and White), that the cumulative effect is strangely exhilarating. Plus, it's not as if the funny has completely vanished. We get a welcome jolt here and there from Frank's moronic get-rich-quick schemes, the child-rearing strategies of the Gallaghers' neighbors Vi and Kevin (Shanola Hampton and Steve Howey, the latter of whom walks away with every scene he's given), or the increasingly convoluted dating life of the Gallaghers' former-agoraphobic family-friend Sheila (a deliciously madcap Joan Cusack). The difference is, we respond to the comedy like it's oxygen. Over its four years, Shameless has been quietly establishing itself as Showtime's best weekly series (sorry, Homeland), and minus a disappointing last-minute revelation in the fourth-season finale, this season might just be its finest yet. I'd liken the creative and emotional jump here to the fourth seasons of The Wire and Friday Night Lights or the second season of Parks and Recreation - you can sense Shameless going for broke in its pursuit of greatness.