That command should remove any line which contains an equals sign, or an opening parenthesis; the dash you put between also causes it to remove all lines which contain a character whose ASCII code falls between those two, in theory; however,
( comes before
= in ASCII so I guess it doesn't really change anything (but could also be the reason you're not getting it to work). Take out the dash and try again? Or move it first or last in the class, like
Code:
grep -v '[-=(]' file