The Equalizer — Characters & Cast

To keep a promise to the dead — and, when that becomes impossible, to make sure the person in front of him survives. As Washington put it, McCall 'has tried to put that behind him but circumstances won't allow that.'

Begins as a deliberately diminished man — a former CIA black-ops operative living a small, orderly life at a home-improvement store, faithful to a promise made to his dying wife. A friendship formed over late nights at a diner, and the brutal beating that ends it, draws him back into the capacities he had renounced. By the finale he has stopped hiding, accepted what he is, and redirected it outward as protection rather than profession.

Restoring his employers' control and profit, and satisfying the professional's need to beat the only opponent who has ever been his equal.

Arrives as the fixer sent to clean up after McCall's first strike and to restore order to a criminal organization that has never been meaningfully challenged. Confident, articulate and methodical, he spends the film narrowing in on who the anonymous killer is — and steadily discovering that he is outmatched by a man with better reasons. His hunt drives the plot to the store siege where he takes the employees hostage to force McCall into the open.

Escape — and the ordinary future she describes to a stranger at a diner counter as though saying it out loud might make it real.

A young woman trafficked and controlled by the Russian mob, encountered by McCall during her nights at the same 24-hour diner. Her ambitions and her fear humanize the abstraction of organized crime; her hospitalization after a savage beating is what sparks McCall back to life. She survives the story as the film's proof that the violence bought something, and the closing farewell between the two of them caps their relationship.