Equalizer 2, The (2018) [Blu-ray]
Action | Crime | Thriller

Tagline: There is no equal.

Denzel Washington returns to one of his signature roles in the first sequel of his career. Robert McCall serves an unflinching justice for the exploited and oppressed - but how far will he go when that is someone he loves?

Storyline: Director Antoine Fuqua reunites with Denzel Washington in this sequel to 2014's The Equalizer. Washington resumes his role as Robert McCall: a retired CIA Black Ops operative who works as a security guard and moonlights as a vigilante. When his long-time friend Melissa Leo Susan Plummer) is murdered, he embarks on a relentless, globe-trotting quest for vengeance.

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Martin Liebman, December 11, 2018 There are two kinds of pain in this world. Pain that hurts. Pain that alters.

Antoine Fuqua's The Equalizer 2 sets out to recreate the structural and storytelling successes of the original film, a finely woven character piece about a man gifted in violence who does bad things in an effort to set things right. The sequel offers much of the same but this time without the character depth, storytelling dynamics, and interesting setting that lifted the first to great heights. Washington again inhabits the character with an agreeable demeanor away from violence and a capable and calm confidence in the midst of it and Fuqua again crafts the film with obvious know-how. Still, the story falls flat even as its more personal arc moves Washington's McCall in a way the previous story could not. This sequel is overly long, somewhat unfocused, and generally predictable. Washington's performance saves it from a total loss. It's entertaining enough at its broadest level, but against that vastly superior original this one falls well short of expectations.

Robert McCall (Washington), the gifted ex-government operative who has taken to using his viciously violent and finely honed skills against the evils that exist in the world around him, has moved on from hardware and taken a job as a Lyft driver. In his job, he often sees the best of humanity: an elderly man in search of his sister, a young man off to Iraq, a young woman recently accepted to college. He also sees the worst. He is not afraid to take a detour to save a life and punish wrongdoers; it's in his DNA. But when one of the few friends he has left in the world, Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo), is murdered in the line of duty, McCall injects himself into her death and the apparent murder-suicide she was investigating. Soon, McCall finds himself in the midst of a terrible storm of violence that unfortunately and inadvertently also involves Miles Whittaker (Ashton Sanders), a gifted young artist whom McCall has taken under his wing.

The film is not so much a showcase of McCall's skills as it is a continuation of his story, "the next chapter" perhaps being more apropos to the character who loves to read and, in this film, is on the final book of his list of 100 "must-reads." Reading plays a reduced role in this film, as does his "equalizer vision" which enables him to essentially slow down time and assess his situation to find the most efficient means of killing his attackers. It's in this film more as a reminder that he can do it and less as a necessary component in defining the character. Perhaps Fuqua intends that this film not simply regurgitate the first, assuming audiences know Robert McCall already, both what he can do and how he does it, but the result is that the movie loses some of the character detail and depth from the first film. This is a procedural film, not a character film, with a lengthy set-up and an even longer journey towards the end confrontation, which is larger and more dynamic than the end sequence from the first film but also less rewarding because the build-up is much more stale. In isolation, it's the best sequence in the series. Within the film it's a modest reward for a fairly choppy and slow journey to it.

The mid-film reveal is not difficult to see coming and there's little emotional attachment to McCall's fight. Whereas the last film felt more personal for the audience, it feels less so here, more abstract, perhaps because it's more personal for McCall. This movie is ultimately a bit scattered, with a few running plot lines, none of which are particularly interesting. McCall once again has a pet project. In the last film it was an overweight co-worker with aspirations of passing a fitness test in order to get a better job at the store as a security guard. In this film it's a high school student with a gift for art who strays into trouble with the wrong crowd. As with the first film's project, the boy in this film winds up in the middle of the violent climax. It's not that his story does not add to the film, it's that his story is absolutely unoriginal. Miles' relationship with McCall lacks the chemistry-laden charm of that in the original. There's also a plot thread about an elderly man named Sam who is one of McCall's regular riders in his Lyft job that is resolved in a cutaway scene at film's end, but the entire story could have been left on the cutting room floor to improve the film's pace.

The Equalizer 2 is a perfectly competent film that simply lacks the rich and layered character dynamics of the original. It's plodding and procedural, the story between McCall and his teenage project lacks interest, and the film's finale is spectacular but not quite enough reward for an otherwise slow-to-build and not particularly engaging storyline. It's but a decent successor to the wonderful original. Sony's Blu-ray, on the other hand, is just about perfect. Five-star video and audio are accompanied by a very good assortment of extra content. Recommended.

[CSW] -2.8- Denzel's first sequel is here as Robert McCall who spends his days Lyft driving, finding peace, and occasionally... enacting justice. This movie on the surface is well built, but it just doesn't fully deliver. The pacing is a bit slow at times, and the ending wasn't as memorable as it could have been because the plot falls off a cliff with respect to logic about 30 minutes from the end. Not as good as the first one, but still worth renting.
[V5.0-A5.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box motion codes were available at the time of this rental although they are available now.



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