Denzel Washington rejoins director Antoine Fuqua for the sequel to 2014's neo-noir action thriller, based on the '80s TV series of the same name.
Retired CIA black ops operative Robert McCall (Washington) - a man who serves an unflinching form of justice - returns to his old ways after discovering the murder of a friend. McCall sets out to find and punish the perpetrators.
Blue collar heroes who administer vigilante justice tend to be ideologically interesting characters, squashed by the same system they see themselves as morally above. The protagonist of The Equalizer films, Robert McCall (Denzel Washington), espouses a conservative ethos, believing bureaucratised institutions have reduced the capacity for basic fairness. Like virtually any character, in life as in film, he regards himself as the hero of his narrative.
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The Equalizer 2 begins on a train to Istanbul. Denzel Washington, wearing a skullcap and beard, is reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World And Me. Soon after, he murders a couple of very bad Turkish men.
Full reviewJudging by the ponderous tone and pace, Fuqua thinks he's making high art (likely aspiring to something existential like Jean-Pierre Melville's "Le Samouraï"), but this is a grisly exploitation movie at best.
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Like all great actors, Mr. Washington commits to the performance, but every so often he also breathes fire, imbuing a scene with such shocking ferocity and bone-deep moral certitude that everything else falls blissfully away.
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That Washington is charming enough to disguise McCall's clear streak of Travis Bickle-level sociopathy ranks as this production's greatest asset.
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This solid, but unspectacular sequel (Washington's first in a more than 50-film career) is a movie that plays by a "very particular set" of rules.
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This distinctive character is gradually subsumed by familiar genre imperatives that eventually make McCall seem less special and singular than he did on first exposure in 2014.
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The climactic dispensation of rough justice... is almost worth the price of admission. However, the grind of the getting-there could have you requesting a discount.
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Builds on the low-flash action chops of the original to bring us more of the good stuff.
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