There are Oscar winners and there are action stars.
This is the Hollywood binary that prevents an Academy Award for stunts and determines that no amount of fight choreography ever adds up to a performance.
Instead, the equivalent awards body for the action world is, say, the Expendables series, and only so many make the cut.
When Sylvester Stallone is drafting his shortlist – Schwarzenegger, Lundgren, Statham, Li, Van Damme – would an Oscar winner like Denzel Washington ever be considered? Sure, he’s never headlined a series of supermarket DVDs with interchangeable titles, doesn’t embody a particular style of fighting, and most importantly, he already has a niche: A-list actor.
And yet, he’s about to bookend an action trilogy of his very own, one convincingly built around an action star.
In retrospect, The Equalizer films appear less as an amusing diversion in an otherwise upright filmography than the logical…
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