Mark Reviews Movies: THE EQUALIZER 2

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 19, 2018

The original The Equalizer left Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) taking up the role of a kind of independent vigilante for hire, after realizing that he was pretty good at and found satisfaction in helping those in need—especially if violence was involved. That film stumbled on occasion, particularly as it got more into the character's back story and became a fairly routine actioner, but it worked as a study of a lonely man, haunted by a sense of injustice in the world.

The sequel, made by the same writer-director team and seeing Washington return to the eponymous role, strips away its predecessor's concentration on what makes the hero tick. The elements of the original film that felt tacked on or out of character have been emphasized in The Equalizer 2. Here, Robert is caught up in an ill-explained conspiracy involving the intelligence agency of which he was once a part, and he has to dole out bloody revenge against the people who killed one of his few friends. It's a simple plot, to be sure, which is why it's so confounding that Richard Wenk's screenplay seems incapable of explaining any of what happens.

This is a prime example of a sequel that was made for no other reason than that some people with money demanded it, hoping for an easy return on the investment. It doesn't reveal anything new about the character, add anything new to its established formula, or recognize what actually worked in its predecessor. It does, though, give us a plot that makes little to no sense, provide Washington with a chance to sleepwalk through his performance, and offer up a most illogical and overblown standoff of a climax—presumably in the hopes that we'll be so distracted by the spectacle that we'll ignore how inexplicable the sequence and the story leading up to it are.

Sometime after the events of the first film, Robert is a driver for a web-based transportation company and moonlights as a helper for hire. The opening scene is set on a train heading toward Istanbul, where Robert rescues a woman's kidnapped daughter from her abusive father and three of his goons. The rest of the story involves international intrigue, as well, as a covert intelligence agent and his wife in Brussels are killed by mercenaries, who stage the scene to look like a murder-suicide.

Robert's former handler Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo), who still works for the intelligence agency, is sent to investigate, and she's also murdered in an apparent robbery gone wrong. Robert, working out of his now-nicer apartment in Boston, thinks that something is amiss. He gets some help from Susan's partner and Robert's former military teammate Dave (Pedro York).

There are two main threads here: the plot involving Susan's murder and Robert's new routine. The scenes pertaining to the latter thread don't provide any new information about the character, and they primarily overburden the story with characters who distract the screenplay from its main plot. There's a Holocaust survivor (played by Orson Bean) who's trying to reclaim a painting of his sister, and there's also a woman (played by Sakina Jaffrey) who lives in Robert's apartment complex and whose garden is trashed by gang members.

The exception comes from Miles (Ashton Sanders), an aspiring artist who's close to joining a gang to help his family. That relationship, as Robert tries to teach the young man the benefits of hard work and the dangers of a life devoted to violence, has some worthwhile moments. It also makes Robert, who insists that "'Man' ain't spelled g-u-n," look like a bit of hypocrite, given his own tendency toward bloodshed. It's almost inevitable that Miles will be used as the bad guys' pawn by the end.

The investigative/revenge side of the plot leads to a predictable betrayal, as well as a whole lot of confusion involving who's working for whom and why. Wenk doesn't bother to explain anything akin to motivation (except to give the main villain a nihilistic monologue) or exposition (The timeline of Robert's involvement in the military and the intelligence service, not to mention the relationship with his deceased wife, is an open question that seems pretty important). It just plays out with Robert threatening the bad guys and then carrying through on his threats in a climax set within an abandoned town during a near-hurricane-level storm.

What's the thinking behind Robert going there and the villains following him? There's no logic behind it, but then again, there's no logic behind the majority of this story. Director Antoine Fuqua seems content to have Robert kill bad guys in increasingly brutal ways. That, it seems, is the only reason The Equalizer 2 exists.

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