Nine minutes. This is Queen Latifah’s waiting time to start beating the bad guys on CBS reboot The equalizer. And man, it’s worth the wait.
The pilot episode debuted on Sunday after the Super Bowl, and starred Latifah as Robyn McCall, a newly retired CIA agent who is trying to establish a peaceful life of motherhood and school dropout. She almost fulfills her wish until an old trainer and mentor named Bishop (Chris Noth) asks to meet at the Magic Wheel of Coney Island to talk about what ended up being her stealthy dismissal.
The last mission broke her, Robyn says at her clandestine night meeting, despite Bishop’s message from “The Company” that she can still return. Bishop even says that Robyn can come to work for him at his private security company. “When I can’t sleep at night, it’s not the things I did that keep me awake,” a determined Robyn said as she declined all Bishop’s offers. “These are the people I couldn’t save.” And with that, Robyn stays behind to look into the darkness and ponder his choices after Bishop leaves.
It’s a good thing she does, too, because that’s when Robyn sees a young woman and a somber-looking guy squeezing through a wire fence to enter the amusement park. Robyn, mother of a teenager of the same age, worries about the underage stranger and follows the two. (As viewers learned earlier, the girl, whose name is Jewel, witnessed a murder for which she was accused and is meeting with some guys in the underworld to buy a fake ID and passport so she can get away.)
Robyn doesn’t know any of this yet, but her Spider senses are still telling her to check things out just in case. See, guys in the underworld don’t follow the rules, and instead of selling the girl the fake documents, the villain takes her money and decides that he and his three friends are going to rape her first. That is, until Robyn appears and spoils his sick plan.
Straight from Casting Central, the henchman with a Russian accent tells Robyn to mind his own business. “I’ll tell you, I tried,” Robyn says, stepping closer to the idiot and channeling his inner Liam Neeson, low voice, narrow eyes and everything. “But it turns out that I’m really bad at that. But there are other things that I am real Good in. So, why don’t you let this girl go, and I’ll let you out of here. “
The henchman and his slimy friends laugh at Robyn’s words and pull out their weapons – but before they can pull the triggers, she disarms the henchman and shoots the others with her weapon. Two of them get up to fight her with a hammer and wrench, but she defeats them with her own tools to the sound of fast-paced rap music. (This is especially cool because Latifah recently told reporters that the musician in his fight against the show’s villains with a song in his head, and she knows she has to knock them out when the hook falls.)
Like fans of the original 80s The equalizer I will tell you, Edward Woodward was a nice old guy, but he couldn’t fight a drum beat. Using what appears to be a fighting style called Wing Chun, Latifah proves that he doesn’t need to have muscles to destroy bad guys. She also doesn’t have to be Denzel Washington in the film versions of The equalizer. Or even a man. Latifah, who clearly knows how to fight, just needs to be faster and more skilled than the other guys.
The beating also allows Robyn to fulfill her life’s mission and the purpose of the show – to save people in need who cannot turn to the police. Although there is a better cop than the others (played by actor Tory Kittles), Robyn knows that he must first prove Jewel’s innocence. To keep the tension high in the action drama, Robyn also has to save Jewel more than once and rely on his experienced companions (played by Liza Lapira and Adam Goldberg) from his days at the CIA. Bishop even gives a hand, but not before another group of villainous thugs soak Robyn’s hair while drowning her. Throwing water on a black woman’s head? Oh, you’re going to die.
Because, make no mistake, Robyn is a black woman in an America with her first black and South Asian vice president and a black woman named Stacey Abrams who helped make Georgia blue. A black woman can also match all types of criminals, throw darts and Support your aunt (played by the incomparable Lorraine Toussaint) to help her raise her rebellious daughter. We can’t wait for the PTO to get a load from this mother.