There is something deeply ugly and crass in director Antoine Fuqua’s fatuous drama-thriller, based on the 80s TV show with Edward Woodward. It has none of the style or wit that marked Fuqua’s 2001 breakthrough, Training Day, and Washington’s usual irrepressible charm and intelligence are smothered. He plays Robert McCall, a quiet guy working at a DIY superstore, perhaps retired from some more exciting job. McCall strikes up a platonic, fatherly friendship with a beautiful young woman, Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz), whom he discovers is being forced to work as a prostitute by Russian gangsters, and is being beaten and abused. Robert quickly unveils an almost supernatural talent for combat – a kind of macho-gallant superpower – to hit back at these bullies on her behalf and put right other wrongs elsewhere in the city. The movie serves up the dodgiest have-your-cake-and-eat-it menu: you get to see the women brutalised and assaulted,and also the men, the second spectacle presumably justified by the first. And all quite without any insight or perspective. Women are entirely unimportant, and simpering Moretz turns out to be a minor character, to say the very least. As for Washington, he has no samurai charisma here, just a tiresome pudding-faced reluctance to smile.

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