Director: Antoine Fuqua
Distributor: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Duration: 121 minutes
The Equalizer 2 (DVD) – Movie Review
Denzel Washington played his share of badass roles over the years, and while the actor isn’t getting any younger, in 2014 The Equalizer blew us away and showed that Denzel still got it. Now, four years later, Denzel returns to his role as Robert McCall, a vigilante that is no stranger to extreme violence to get the job done. While the first movie was quite entertaining, be it as an action movie with a hefty amount of kickass moves, we weren’t sure if a sequel had to be made to keep the story going. Even though certain scenes entertained us, the feeling of redundancy stayed with us until the credits started rolling.
Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) has gone completely off the grid, building up a new life somewhere far away. This time he spends his days as a Lyft driver, but he hasn’t left his vigilante days behind him, as he still helps those around him, or even those that end up in his car that are clearly in need of help. He lives a fairly modest life now, and he has taken a liking to Miles Whittaker (Ashton Sanders), a local boy, who has ambitions of becoming an artist, but simply hangs around with the wrong crowd. Robert is quite intent on keeping this one off the streets, but things won’t be as simple as he thinks.
In the meantime a murder occurs in Brussels, which needs the investigatory expertise of Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo), a close friend of Robert. Susan decides to head to the crime scene, even though she is technically retired. Sadly, her investigatory skills also seem to be her downfall, as she is brutally murdered only mere moments after her first tour of the crime scene. This of course sends Robert on a crusade to find those guilty, and this time the gloves come off, meaning they will soon find themselves six feet under.
The pacing of the movie feels quite about right, even with the somewhat lengthy and drawn-out introduction and short conclusion. The spread of information and action is properly done, and they alternate just enough in order to keep things exciting. Still, the story content feels a bit flimsy and doesn’t really justify the creation of a sequel. Somehow the movie feels like they did their best to actually find ‘something’ that would or could serve as a plot for a second movie, but they settled with just killing a friend of the protagonist and called it a day. The addition of the new young ‘protégé’ also feels like it was just thrown in to create a certain likeability or to make Robert feel more human, even after his disappearance and the reboot of his life somewhere else.
With Denzel Washington being the main focus of the movie, there isn’t that much that can go wrong in the acting department. Even in this second installment of the series his character feels convincing and somewhat realistic. Ashton Sanders’ character Miles feels a bit rushed and stereotypical, which somewhat drags down the likeability of his character and makes the movie somewhat more tedious. Melissa Leo on the other hand does play her role with conviction and this does up the quality of the movie, creating two great characters out of a main cast of three. The antagonists do a reasonable job, but their roles in the movie feel very redundant.
The DVD edition of The Equalizer 2 doesn’t come with that many extra features, as you’ll only get around twenty minutes of additional content. You’ll get a small snippet about the action in the movie, a featurette about the cast and a few funny ‘casting’ videos, where Denzel claimed he never does sequels for movies. Overall, the special features are fun to watch, but they don’t add a lot of value to the movie.
Conclusion
The Equalizer 2 is still a fun action movie to see once, or if you are truly into the franchise, multiple times for its action sequences. The story value is OK and both old and new characters come together quite nicely, but overall things feel a bit flimsy and as stated in the introduction, the movie feels a bit useless as there was no good reason to make a sequel. Again, the movie can certainly be enjoyed by action enthusiasts, but this series could have done better when it was a one-hit-wonder, instead of diluting the original into something less qualitative.
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