The Equalizer 2
starring Denzel Washington, Pero Pascal, Ashton Sanders, Bill Pullman and Melissa Leo
screenplay by Richard Wenk
directed by Antoine Fuqua
Rating: ◊◊◊◊◊
This is the sequel to the 2014 film The Equalizer, and both are based on a mid-1980s American TV drama of the same name. I thought the first Equalizer film in 2014 was okay. Not great, but okay. But Number 2 is just plain dull. Nothing new with even less story than the first one. Robert McCall is a retired military intelligence officer. In the first movie he was working a nondescript job as a hardware store clerk. In the second movie he has a similarly nondescript job as a hired driver. No one suspects his military past. He lives a quiet, unremarkable life, under everyone’s radar and (dangerously) underestimated. Only after he is provoked does he start killing people - no one who doesn’t deserve it, of course - in the most spectacular, controlled and well-timed manner. Retirement hasn’t dulled his spycraft skills and he is even better at it than all the bad guys who are actively living the life. The story in the first movie was more comprehensible, explaining why he became active to protect and rescue a prostitute from Russian mobsters. But the explanation of why he is rehabilitated to active service in the second film is even weaker and more convoluted. It requires a much bigger canvas involving covert characters from his past whose participation in the story conveniently fill in McCall’s backstory. In the first movie, McCall was just a neighborhood retired spy - the retired spy around the corner. In the second movie he achieves an international reach.
I liked the first movie better.