Some movies are more equal than others. The Equalizer 2 isn’t one of them.
FILM REVIEW
Equalizer 2 If you were watching The Equalizer on TV in the fall of 1985 — Wednesdays at 10 on CBS, right after Crazy Like a Fox — you had only seven days to wait for Robert McCall to again avenge some wronged innocent. In the Denzel Washington movie version, however, almost four years have passed since the first episode. Justice may be merciless, but it’s anything but swift.
As is often the case with sequels, however, this time it’s personal — even though one bad guy makes a point of telling Washington late in the movie: “None of this is personal.” McCall’s old CIA buddy Susan (Melissa Leo) is caught up in some messy business in Brussels that’s leaving a lot of bodies in its wake, and the ol’ Equalizer (though he never uses the name) must step in to help.
He’s having a busy time of it in Antoine Fuqua’s followup to the more straightforward original. Instead of working in a hardware store, McCall has started a job as a Lyft driver, sometimes taking people to the airport and sometimes stepping in to help in other ways. For instance, when some rich kids are assaulting a female intern, McCall responds by — well, let’s just say the man is declined with his own credit card.
McCall has also taken a kid (Ashton Sanders) from his Boston neighbourhood under his wing, encouraging the lad’s artistic talent while trying to keep him out of the drug trade.
Fuqua is generally a nononsense director, but he seems a little lost in this, his first sequel among 13 bigscreen outings. Granted, he’s never been brief — his movies routinely run over two hours — but in this one we’re almost an hour in and still new killers and victims are being introduced. Also, for a feature that features basically three locations — Boston, Washington and Brussels — the director spends a lot of times on establishing shots and location-specific subtitles.
And given how the Equalizer was created as a dogooder who used violence as a last resort, McCall seems all too eager to crack skulls. In his biggest speech, he informs a group of thugs he’s going to kill each of them, adding that his only regret is being able to do it only once.
The plot leads inexorably to a final showdown, this one in a small New England town battered by a storm the film has been telling us is approaching since the first reel. Our hero proves remarkably less inventive here than he did in the previous film’s climax, which basically turned McCall into MacGyver.
But perhaps the biggest problem here is that the Equalizer exists as a kind of cypher. Sure, he has his tics — a little OCD, a mania for working his way through the 100 books you have to read, topped by Proust’s In Search of Lost Time — but aside from quick reflexes and some Holmesian powers of observation, what has he to offer? (Or to quote one character’s never-answered query: “Who are you, man?”)
Robert McCall may have been better suited to an age when you could channel-hop to Spenser: For Hire or Remington Steele, and try again the following week. As a multiplex offering, alongside tiny superheroes and giant dinosaurs, he may not be worth your time, even every four years. ★★ The Equalizer 2 opens across Canada on July 20.