Denzel’s vigilante aims truer this time round
The Equalizer 2
15 cert, 121 min
Dir Antoine Fuqua Starring Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Ashton Sanders, Melissa Leo, Bill Pullman
In The Equalizer, a brooding Denzel Washington folded napkins with OCD precision for an hour-anda-half, then weaponised the entire contents of his workplace, a Boston hardware superstore, against a bunch of Russian mafiosi. His character, Robert Mccall, hadn’t quite figured out his new Mccalling yet, and nor had the film: a lamebrained, draggy update of the Eighties Edward Woodward show.
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 pickup is agreed, but it’s not likely it would get you in his all-important good books.
The film starts on a train to Istanbul, with Washington in choice disguise as a straggly-bearded Muslim cleric, aiming to save the daughter of a bookshop owner from the spiteful clutches of her dad. He does this anonymously and without demanding credit in any way, though his trademark napkinfolding 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 longterm 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 streets. There are sundry – too many – other subplots. There’s the elderly Holocaust survivor tracking down a long-lost painting, a staged murdersuicide in Brussels, and all sorts. There’s only so much a secret badass Samaritan can achieve without his audience losing track at some point.
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. We hear that a storm is brewing a couple of reels in, and the whole last hour turns grey and thunderous on cue, with waves lapping all over the Massachusetts wetlands, and gunshots cracking through the gloom.
Sanders 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.
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 at a time. At base, these are meat-and-potatoes 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.