The Equalizer 2 review: Even Denzel Washington can't make this clunker add up

1/3
Guy Lodge17 August 2018

I don't need to tell you that we are living in the age of the sequel: so far, they account for seven of 2018’s 10 highest-grossing films internationally.

So be it, but can’t studio executives at least get more inventive with their titles? Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again was a break from an endless factory line of blandly numbered sequels, including this grim-faced follow-up to a Denzel Washington shoot-’em-up you almost certainly haven’t thought about since its release in 2014. Would it have killed them to call it The Sequelizer?

These are the thoughts that occupied my brain for much of Antoine Fuqua’s lengthy, initially generic rehash of a rehash — adapted from that creaky Eighties vigilante TV series of the same name — before the sheer, scrambled strangeness of its storytelling took precedence.

It’s an urban revenge thriller that eventually climaxes with a cat-and-mouse showdown in an abandoned, village in the midst of a hurricane, just so the cinematographer gets to use his full palette of moody blues. It’s a modern action enterprise that bizarrely tosses in an irrelevant Holocaust-survivor subplot because, well, it can’t be a Denzel Washington movie without some gravitas, right?

And why not kick off with Washington in Muslim dress thwarting kidnappers on the Turkish railways, before spending a good 20 minutes on his day job as a Lyft driver? The film is more than two hours long: we’ve got time to fill.

First among equalisers: Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) and Miles Whitaker (Ashton Sanders)
2018 CTMG, Inc

Once you put such disconnected diversions aside there’s not a lot of movie left to discuss, though what remains is business as before. Washington returns as former CIA operative-turned-street-justice warrior Robert McCall, doling out arse-kickings and Ta-Nehisi Coates quotes in equal measure as he avenges the death of a beloved colleague. A notch less reactionary and unpleasant than its one-star predecessor, it’s still clunky, over-processed cement-mixer cinema, given some consistency by Washington’s screen presence and even a fleeting lick of humanity by yet another plot strand, detailing McCall’s quasi-paternal mentoring of a young tenement tough.

The kid is played by the superb Moonlight star Ashton Sanders, who has far brighter films in his future than this one, hopefully without numerals tailing the title. With any luck he won’t be back in 2022 for The Equalizer 3: More Than Equal. His venerable co-star surely will.

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