Denzil in overdrive mode
In The Equalizer a brooding Denzel Washington folded napkins with OCD precision for an hour-and-a-half, then weaponised the entire contents of his workplace, a Boston hardware superstore, against a bunch of vengeful Russian mafiosi.
His character, Robert McCall, hadn’t quite figured out his new McCalling yet, and nor had the film: a lame-brained, draggy update of the old Edward Woodward action show from the ’80s, about a retired intelligence agent setting the world to rights, using his bare knuckles, tree pruners . . . you name it.
The Equalizer 2 gives McCall a more robust, even dignified, sense of vocation. For starters, he’s become a driver for Lyft, the Uber-like taxi app, and this is thoroughly up his soulsearching street.
He gets to exchange significant words with strangers, or hear snatches of their life stories, multiple times a day. If he doesn’t approve, they tend to know about it.
For instance: some coked-up city boys dump a traumatised call-girl in the back of his cab and, having driven her to safety, he returns to their hotel, not just to teach them a lesson, but guarantee a five-star rating (for her, not himself).
It’s unclear what happens if you thumb-cancel on McCall five minutes after your pick-up is agreed, but it’s not likely it would get you in his all-important good books.
Thankfully, cinema’s latest fly-by-night vigilante has so much on his plate that minor infractions of Lyft protocol may have to wait for redress.
The film starts on a train to Istanbul, with Washington in choice disguise as a stragglybearded Muslim cleric, aiming to save the daughter of a neighbourhood bookshop owner from the spiteful clutches of her dad.
He does this anonymously and without demanding credit in any way, though his trademark napkin-folding and stopwatch-clicking, prior to busting everyone’s heads in, may one day get him rumbled.
For help in choosing such tasks he seeks the advice of his clued-in friend Susan (Melissa Leo) until she plunges into peril, and he also has a new long-term project in the shape of Miles, a local teenager played by Moonlight’s Ashton Sanders, who needs guiding away from a dangerous life on the street corners and has no one else to mentor him.
There are sundry – too many – other subplots. There’s the elderly Holocaust survivor tracking down a long-lost painting, a staged murder-suicide in Brussels and all sorts.
Still, credit where it’s due to returning director Antoine Fuqua, in his fourth Washington hook-up. This is far more rhythmically assured than the first one, and gains a feel for urban melancholy in the editing and score that nudges close to elegance at times.
It also has a distinctly preferable villain, one not to be unmasked by the likes of me, even if he happens to be hiding in plain sight. We hear that a storm is brewing a couple of reels in and the whole last hour of the picture turns grey and thunderous on cue, with waves lapping all over the Massachusetts wetlands and gunshots cracking through the gloom.
Sanders, so stunningly vulnerable as the middle of Moonlight’s three Chirons, does a lot of hard work to help us care.
Far more appreciably than Chloë Moretz last time, he gets the best out of Washington, who plays against him with a wary, fatherly gravitas, keeping his cool. There’s a sharp suspense sequence with that character clambering into the panic room McCall has installed behind a bookcase and quivering with terror at his possible discovery.
Then Fuqua successfully pulls off a climax that’s even more High-Noon-ish than the first one, with Washington skulking around abandoned houses as the hurricane rages and picking off his mercenary foes one headlock or homemade explosive at a time.
At base, these are meat-andpotatoes genre thrills, but the meat’s decently seasoned, and, even if there’s too much token foliage crowding the plate, it’s cute that they mind about presentation. – The Telegraph