Daft but deadly Denzel’s still a class act
DENZEL WASHINGTON turns 64 this year — not that he much resembles the balding old codger The Beatles sang about.
‘If I’d been out till quarter to three, would you lock the door,’ trilled Paul McCartney in When I’m 64. Well, there’d be no point locking out big Denzel, or at least his character in The Equalizer 2, Robert McCall. He’d be through that door in no time, looking for vengeance.
McCall is a former special forces operative, as they always are in movies such as this. Actually, The Equalizer films were inspired by the Eighties TV series of the same name, starring Edward Woodward, though, of course, the levels of violence have been cranked up for the silver screen.
McCall snaps men’s fingers, arms, legs and necks as if they were Twiglets, but only if they have done something Morally Wrong. That’s the equalising bit. Washington, in his fourth collaboration with director Antoine Fuqua, plays a kind of vengeful god, punishing bad people for their sins by maiming or slaughtering them in a variety of horrible ways. Yet, beneath it all, he’s a humble sort of cove.
In the first film, he read Hemingway and worked in a DIY superstore, which was handy when he needed to tool up. I recall the villains being killed with just about everything you might find in your local B&Q. If he’d gone on any longer, he’d have started spirit-levelling them to death.
This time round, he’s reading Proust and driving a taxi, which, again, is handy in terms of meeting people whose lives need straightening. These include a sweet old Holocaust survivor and a rape victim, but first — even before the opening credits — he returns a little girl to her mother after flattening her father, who has abducted her, plus all his cronies.
This happens on a train rattling through Turkey. McCall doesn’t half get about in the name of moral equilibrium.
He also finds time to save a kid in his Boston neighbourhood (Ashton Sanders, from Moonlight) from big bad influences, yet all of this is tangential to the film’s main storyline, which kicks off with the brutal execution of a Belgian couple in their swanky Brussels apartment.
None of this, starting with the character of McCall himself, is remotely plausible.
Yet Washington, as ever, is a class act, while Fuqua directs with pace and verve.