Movie Review: The Equalizer (2014)

by Tony Dayoub


I never watched the original Edward Woodward TV series Antoine Fuqua's The Equalizer is based on. As a critic colleague reminded me, "Well, it was for the blue-hairs." And so it probably was, despite having a high quotient of violence and a killer main theme by the Police drummer Stewart Copeland. The new remake isn't much different, except maybe for abandoning Copeland's classic pulsating bit of electronica. Fuqua reunites with his Training Day star Denzel Washington and further strips down a premise that's already pretty spare to begin with. What's left is so thin and empty, a cloud of vapor would feel more substantial in comparison.

Movie Review: Dark Shadows (2012)

by Tony Dayoub

It's ironic that Tim Burton—whose expressionism-by-way-of-acid-tinged Batman was the forerunner of the modern superhero film—has a new film getting trounced in the box office by The Avengers, the ultimate example of the very kind of genre he helped to usher in at the start of his career. And that this film is Dark Shadows, not only a property with a fervent cult audience but probably the most satisfying effort from Burton in quite a long time. Based on the Gothic soap which ran on ABC from 1966-1971, Dark Shadows is the apotheosis of Burton's artistic concerns, perfectly fusing his love of all things dark and creepy with his off-kilter family dynamics in a way only glimpsed at in previous efforts like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and most precisely (but all too briefly) in his 1984 short, Frankenweenie. In films like Sweeney Todd, Burton gets the sense of dark foreboding right, but misses that infectious feeling of benign wonder which his other movies are bursting with. And most of the rest of his oeuvre, though exuberant in its ability to astonish with imaginative production design and fanciful style, doesn't quite get that Hammer horror feel of movies like Sleepy Hollow. Perhaps Dark Shadows succeeds because, by Burton's own admission, it was a formative influence.