Starring: Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Ashton Sanders, Melissa Leo, Bill Pullman
Distributor: Sony Pictures
Runtime: 121 mins. Reviewed in Aug 2018
Reviewer: Callum Ryan
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After seeing early cuts of ‘The Equalizer’, Sony executives greenlit a sequel for the Denzel Washington-starring actioner. As they had predicted, audiences flocked to the film about an ex-CIA agent who uses his lethal skillset to help strangers in strife, which rode decent reviews and Washington’s considerable pulling power to a worldwide gross approaching $200 million. Retaining director Antoine Fuqua and writer Richard Wenk, the sequel could have offered more of the same pulpy thrills and delivered a satisfactory experience. Instead, the strangely unfocused story fails to provide the goods, stranding an intense but uncharacteristically imprecise Washington performance in a mess of disappointing plot strands.
Most of these strands are a product of our hero’s wide-reaching vigilantism. Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) cruises the streets of Boston as a rideshare driver, absorbing the day-to-day highs and lows of his clientele. When someone in need crosses his path, be they a victim of sexual abuse or an elderly gentleman looking for a long-lost relative, McCall calls upon his contacts from his past and talent for dispensing violent justice to anonymously solve their problems.
Susan (Melissa Leo), McCall’s former colleague and his primary source, passes him CIA intel when requested. As the only person from McCall’s past life that knows his death was faked, Susan is also his only real friend. He’s friendly with plenty of people – his neighbours for instance, like budding artist Miles (Ashton Sanders, a highlight) and green thumb Fatima (Sakina Jaffrey) – but no one understands him as deeply as Susan. She visits him on his late wife’s birthday and tolerates all his OCD tendencies. This closeness renders Susan’s murder, perpetrated while she is investigating the apparent suicide of an American asset in Brussels, especially painful. Teaming up with Dave (Pedro Pascal), McCall’s former teammate turned DIA operative and Susan’s co-investigator in Brussels, he hunts down those responsible for her death.
While this sounds like a reasonably diverting, revenge-fuelled B-movie, Wenk’s screenplay flounders aimlessly around Boston for close to an hour before arriving at this admittedly compelling raison d’etre. However, even after McCall begins looking into Susan’s death, he continues to divide his attention across a couple of other, less interesting assignments. Because the film dawdles towards Susan’s murder and thereafter spreads itself thinly across a few other subplots, McCall’s complete murder investigation is almost laughably brief (yet illogical), rushing to set up a classic showdown pitting McCall against a hit squad in a hurricane-battered coastal town. Judging by this description alone, the denouement (if well-constructed) could have somewhat vindicated its messy set-up, but it’s surprisingly limp (I say “surprisingly” because the final showdown of the first film, set in a Bunnings-esque hardware store, was filled with inventive action).
Washington brings his trademark intensity to McCall, but his interactions seem to fluctuate exclusively between ferocity (particularly with Ashton Sanders’ Miles) and utter cool. While these halves of the character both convince, McCall seems to move between them at random between scenes, leaving the character feeling ill-defined, schizophrenic almost. It’s as though the B-plots scattered throughout the film were created independently, then spliced at random throughout the A-story. While Washington gets a pass mark in the slim fight scene offerings (an early train fight in Turkey, for instance, is all over in seconds), it takes some snappy editing from Conrad Buff IV for him to convince as an action hero.
‘The Equalizer 2’ marks the first time that Washington has starred in a sequel to one of his own films. It’s frustrating then that, despite the franchise’s title, the second film isn’t equal to the first, sadder still when the original didn’t set an insurmountable bar to clear. Antoine Fuqua has made better films and deserves better, as does Washington. Given the sequel’s decent global opening last weekend, maybe McCall’s next assignment can be attaining justice for its filmmakers and securing a better script.
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