The details:
We meet Robert ‘Bob’ McCall (Denzel Washington): a rather anonymous and very tidy apartment, a job as a manual worker: he tries to help a fellow worker, Ralphie, to pass his exam to become a security guy, after work he goes home but can’t really sleep so every night he goes to the same bar bringing his own teabag. Every night he meets the same girl, a young prostitute about to begin another horrible night. They exchange a few words every night, and we learn that he’s a widower who still misses her, and reads a lot of books because it’s what she liked to do, ‘so they’ll have something to talk about when they meet again’... One night the girl, Teri (real name Alina) who dreams of becoming a singer, reluctantly goes in a man’s car. She didn’t want to but she obeyed. The next night she has bruises on her face: they talk more this time because she needs a kind voice, until the Russian gangster who owns her comes to take her away. She reacted when the ‘client’ beat her, and as a punishment this Slavi beats her up badly and she ends up in a hospital. Robert is worried when he doesn’t see her, until he learns what happened. Teri’s friend explains everything to him. Robert is reluctant for a moment, but then he goes to meet Slavi with 9800$ to buy Teri’s freedom. He’s sent away, laughed at in a threatening way, and he starts to go but stops. He’s made up his mind and kills Slavi and his four men in less than 30 seconds and without a gun, using weapons of chance; then, he sits by Slavi and tells him that Teri will live while he’ll die because he refused the money. When we hear him sigh and apologize it is clear that it’s not directed at him, he probably promised he’d never kill again or something. It’s not really explained clearly, but that’s ok.
When Ralphie leaves his job to go work with his mother after her shop was set on fire, Robert deals with the two dirty cops by blackmailing them with evidence: either they return all the ‘pizzo’ they took or he’ll send the incriminating video everywhere; Ralphie goes back to work and becomes a security guard.
Robert ‘deals’ with a man that robbed the store where he works, learning from the police that they were lucky because in the other three robberies someone got killed. We don’t see how he does it, but we see that the family ring that was stolen is returned and Robert puts back the hammer he borrowed from the store after cleaning it.
The Russian mafia send Teddi (Marton Csokas, as usual playing the villain) to solve the problem. At first they all think it’s a rival gang, but he soon dismisses that possibility. He learns from Teri’s friend that a kind black man went to visit her at the hospital, before killing her. He becomes suspicious of him seeing his picture while entering the restaurant where Slavi was killed but not seeing any picture of him going out the same way, and finding out somehow his address he shows up at his door, even showing him a picture of Teri’s friend dead. Now they know about each other’s existence, and they both want to learn more about their opponent. Teddi has difficulty finding anything of Robert’s past, while we see him driving out of town to meet Brian and his wife Susan.
Here we get more clues about Robert. We hear that Susan is no more operative at the CIA but she’s able anyway to give him all the information he needs about Teddi - real name Nikolaj, and his boss Vladimir Pushkin. We understand that they once worked together, and we hear Brian talking about Robert’s funeral, because everybody thought he was dead although Susan always believed that if anyone was able to get out and create a new life for himself that would be him.
She encourages him to be the good man his wife loved, meaning to help others like he felt he had to help Alina, and later tells her husband that he didn’t come looking for information, but for permission..
No more doubts now, he goes full-in and declares war on Pushkin: he has the Boston police find a bunch of Pushkin’s men with a lot, really a lot of his money, and also gives them information about his entire operation and also the politicians he blackmails or bribes or whatever. He even destroys a ship or something, a very big boom, and Pushkin is very much pissed off.
Nikolaj tries many times to get him but he kills every man he sends. Ultimately, Nikolaj calls him to let him know that either he comes to meet him or his men will kill all the people at his workplace , if we can still call it that.
It’s not clear if he thought of that possibility or not, it seems so absurd that he didn’t, Susan even warned him about Nikolaj not stopping until he’s killed him and those he loves, and yet all the workers there are in real danger, with some men pointing weapons at their heads.
Maybe he thought about it but since there wasn’t really anything he could do about that at this point he chose to deal with it when the moment came. Which is now.
Of course Nikolaj is the real silly guy here, because how could he really think he had won this hand, a guy like Robert would not go to the meeting simply trusting him to let his ‘friends’ go, no, he would go and free them himself.
Robert goes, kills all the men and finally Nikolaj too, hooray. Ralphie takes everybody out and comes back to help him. He’s injured but only in a leg, he’ll live, and after Nikolaj’s death we see Robert walking away, very meaningfully walking away, because it’s clear that he’s also walking away from that life.
We read ‘3 days later’ and we see Robert in Moscow, in Pushkin’s home. He’s killed all his guards already, of course, and tricks him into electrocuting himself, after he’s already walked out.
Two more scenes before the end. Back in Boston, he meets Alina who was actually looking for him. She had disappeared after she was released from the hospital, and now we learn that she had been given 9800$ and a ticket to go away, and she did it, she recovered, she found a normal day job, and now sort of thanks him. She tells him she started reading, which in a way is like a second thank-you.
The other scene shows us that he has posted an online ad for people who need his help.
Someone has written to him ‘I’m in trouble, can you help?’ and he replies yes... I mean, basically he’s the new one-man A-team :-p
Chloë Moretz was really good in the role of Alina. Well, they were all good, every one of them, and not only the actors. It was very well done, I only wished there weren’t so many dark scenes...
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