Denzel returns as Robert McCall, a retired operative who’s lost none of his edge, using his side job as a Lyft driver to help the downtrodden and oppressed. When a friend is killed in the line of duty, McCall steps out of retirement to find the killers and avenge his friend.
I came out of The Equalizer 2 feeling slightly disappointed. Maybe it was just the overcast weather or the fact that someone had brought a howling toddler into the theater, but I felt that The Equalizer 2 hadn’t delivered on the promise that I had expected. I went back to my original review of The Equalizer from 2014 and found that I’d overhyped it in my imagination. I had said that The Equalizer was “nothing groundbreaking” and safely “by-the-numbers,” but the film was carried ably by Denzel’s charisma alone. Put another way, I was surprised how closely my reaction to the sequel matched my review of its predecessor.
The good news, then, is that The Equalizer 2 does exactly what it says on the tin, and fans of the first one will have roughly the same experience a second time around. (Compare to sequels like Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, which lacked any sense of freshness in repeating its forbearer’s bag of tricks.) The plots are roughly similar, with McCall picking up a few more subplots of assisting the common man, as the first film’s finale foreshadowed. It includes also some more bang-up sequences in which McCall proceeds to dismantle an entire room full of guys half his age. It was this edge that reminded me somewhat of Taken, though with somewhat less frenetic editing; like Neeson, Denzel is a man of advancing years (64 of them, to be precise), but he’s not shy about harnessing that youthful energy which makes his age so impossible to believe. Where the first Equalizer had two intensely memorable setpieces – the club scene and the hardware store finale – this one has at least three: an opener aboard a train, the apartment scene glimpsed in the trailers, and a final showdown that repeats the careful orchestration of the hardware store but expands the scope quite dramatically.
There is, however, the acute sense that we have seen all this before (and, if box office receipts are any indication, we will see all of this again). We’ve seen Denzel as the steady paternalistic hand – though not, I grant you, while pointing a gun to his own head and daring his mentee to pull the trigger. We’ve seen him as a one-man demolition crew when the odds would seem to be against him, and we’ve seen him as a helpful community leader. He is quite good at all of these things, so it’s little surprise that The Equalizer 2 calls on him to do them one more time. But the rest of the film is so conventional, so safe, that its plot can be deciphered from the concessions stand. (There is at least one genuinely effective twist, which relies more on an emotional beat than a narrative turn, one I genuinely did not see coming.)
The night I saw The Equalizer 2, I happened to catch Roman J. Israel, Esq. on television. I was reminded of what a commanding performance Denzel gave in that film and how surprisingly the plot’s careening nature presented itself. Like its predecessor, The Equalizer 2 is comparatively more by-the-numbers; when one of those numbers is Denzel Washington, it’s tough to argue, but you’ll be forgiven if you find yourself wanting just a little more Denzel. The Equalizer 2 is Denzel at about a six; just give him more to do.
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