Alastair’s Score: 2/5
From the beginning, Antoine Fuqua’s Equalizer 2 is an exercise in contradictions. This is the first time for both Fuqua and Denzel Washington making a sequel and in an attempt to avoid genre cliches they have instead ended up wearing far too many hats, none of them flattering. Is it a balls-out actioner? A moody character study? A murder mystery?
The answer to all of these questions is “yes but no.”
The movie starts with almost Mission Impossible flair. Our hero, Robert ‘Mack’ McCall (a former CIA hitman, for those of you who didn’t catch the first film) is travelling in disguise on a train near Istanbul, intent on foiling a kidnapping. It’s goofy but fun, and it’s also short-lived. This frankly misleading opener quickly gives way to the more sedate pace of Mack’s life back in Boston, where he works as a Lyft driver and occasional vigilante.
This is the portion of the film that attempts to justify the inevitable brutal violence (because let’s be honest, that’s why we bought the ticket, popcorn, and monster-sized beverage) by showing us what a “good guy” Robert McCall is. He chats with Holocaust survivors, he mentors at-risk inner-city youth, he expands his mind with the works of Marcel Proust and then, before the audience nods off entirely, he kicks seven satisfying shades of shinola out of a group of smug, wealthy rapists.
This scene is arguably the most enjoyable in the movie, revelling in Mack’s morally-justifiable decimation of these privileged abusers. His blank expression assures us that he takes no pleasure in this necessary task, even as we cheer with every audibly broken bone.
Despite McCall’s quiet tones and implaccable stoicism, bad guys are in extreme danger whenever he’s around, and unfortunately so are women. There’s a familiar genre trope which Fuqua’s Equalizer films are pretty blatant about; females exist purely to be brutalised and thereby provide a motive for the “good guy” to visit similar brutality on the perpetrators. It’s a cliche, it’s narratively lazy, and Richard Wenk’s script writes it in bold then underlines it twice when the central plot finally kicks in halfway through the movie.
Melissa Leo plays Susan Plummer, one of Mack’s oldest friends and practically the only one from his old life who knows he’s still around. She’s smart, tough, and capable, but she’s also a woman, so her main role in this movie is to be knocked around a hotel room, in a particularly ugly and violent scene, before being stabbed to death.
So, from this point on, “good guy” Mack McCall can be as brutal as he likes in pursuit of vengeance, because them’s the rules, right?
Mack’s ensuing investigation into his friend’s death is a bit of a plod (especially for anyone who’s seen a movie before and figured out who the bad guy was before the murder even happened), but it does lead to a shining point in the film when McCall confronts the main bad guys. Denzel Washington is a powerful and charismatic performer, probably too fine an implement for this movie filled with blunt objects, and seeing him stand in a pretty suburban street and politely inform four highly-trained badasses that he’s going to hunt them down and kill them is a singular joy.
From there, of course, we soon move to the “big action set-piece” portion of the movie. I mentioned earlier that it felt like Fuqua was attempting to avoid genre cliches, but Washington stalking through an evacuated town as a hurricane rolls in, picking off the bad guys one by one, felt like the ending of every 80’s bullet-fest ever released, even though it was better shot and edited. The climax does shoe-horn in some gory, if unnecessary, visuals to make the most of the R rating, so there’s something to look forward to, if exposed intestines are your thing. Despite the fast-paced and bloody nature of the climax, the entire affair feels muted. Maybe it’s the absence of identity or personality in three out of four bad guys, or maybe it’s Washington’s stone-like visage throughout. His detached expression obviously shows his single-mindedness and control, but also has the unfortunate effect that it never feels like he’s in any real danger, neutering the tension Fuqua is usually so good at building.
Equalizer 2 ends on a quiet note, with McCall mourning his dead wife (another woman who died to motivate him) and staring out to sea, while the people he has helped (well, the male ones anyway) move on with their lives, grateful and hopeful. The at-risk youth is focussing on his artwork now instead of joining a gang, and is creating a superhero character in the image of Robert McCall, because that’s how we’re supposed to see this character; as a hero and not just a man looking for an excuse to hurt people.
We don’t check in with the rape victim from the first half of the movie to see whether McCall’s rampage solved all her problems, and we don’t see Susan’s widower still mourning his wife’s death at the hands of another man’s plot development. We don’t see these things, in part, because Fuqua never goes far enough with any of the genres he tries to cram into this movie. The mystery is mundane, the character study is dreary and fails to ask hard questions, and the action is only occasionally exciting. Thriller, drama, and action fans alike will feel simultaneously pandered to, and yet disappointed.
At the end of the day Denzel Washington deserves better, and so do we.
Theatre Now – On The Screen: Alastair Brown
