![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The Equalizer pictures operate under a false moral imperative, using the mission of cleaning up the streets as a cover for the same pat hyper-stylized, near-pornographic brutality. (That Washington is charming enough to disguise McCall’s clear streak of Travis Bickle-level sociopathy ranks as this production’s greatest asset.) In actuality, he’s in pursuit of something far nastier, cheaper and faster – revenge. He claims to pursue justice, and because Washington has had 30-odd years to perfect his onscreen charisma, the audience may very well believe him. We want him on that wall, we need him on that wall, etc.ĭenzel Washington and Melissa Leo in The Equalizer 2. Like the cowboys who took the law into their own hands before him, a tradition evoked by a final shot mimicking John Ford’s indelible end to The Searchers, he acts as a compromised society’s self-appointed moral guardian. Washington is now 63 years old, and McCall acts even older – though he never tells anyone to pull their sagging pants up, you can tell he is at all times thinking it – but he has no trouble putting the smackdown on men two or three decades his junior. He’s a naked expression of the middle-aged man’s desire to remain relevant and in command of his immediate surroundings. In either case, the mentality undergirding his actions remains the same. Last time around, he was helping out streetwise teen prostitute Chloë Grace Moretz, and now, he’s unraveling a convoluted, uninteresting conspiracy threatening his pals Dave and Susan (Pedro Pascal and Melissa Leo, respectively). He takes it upon himself to pick up the police’s slack by going vigilante with principle, dropping pseudo-slick one-liners about good manners while he dispatches the no-goodniks who fall through the cracks. It starts when some skeevy financial types dump a roughed-up female intern in his car, and McCall goes up to their penthouse to crack some skulls after safely depositing her at the hospital. What a novel idea.But greater evils than the occasional S-word lurk among the high-rises of Boston’s lower-income neighborhoods, and accordingly, McCall must take more extreme measures in his quest to purge the streets of wrongdoers. If this doesn’t lead to his first threequel, we’d be more than happy to watch a TV show starring McCall. Very few actors can make lines like, “I’m going to kill each and every one of you, and the only disappointment is I only get to do it once,” work, but Washington can without breaking a sweat. The law of diminishing returns is in play, especially in a storm-tossed climax that doesn’t come close to the kill-crazy hardware store antics of the original, but it’s still fun to see Denzel kicking all kinds of ass at the ripe old age of 60. But when you’re in the hands of old stagers like Fuqua, writer Richard Wenk and Washington, even the predictable can elicit pleasure. This is the kind of movie where people die exactly when you expect them to, characters get kidnapped exactly when the plot requires it, and hidden agendas are revealed right on cue. Then, as it must, the plot kicks in, and things become more generic. These early scenes, in which Antoine Fuqua - working with Washington for the fourth time, following Training Day, The Magnificent Seven, and the first Equalizer - cuts back and forth between McCall’s interactions with different passengers, are a joy, Washington breathing warmth into a character that might otherwise be lost in his self-imposed isolation. He also keeps himself busy as a Lyft driver, which allows the film to introduce a posse of potential clients/punching bags. He becomes attached to a young black man (Sanders) who has a gift with a paintbrush, but may be heading for a life of crime. ![]() Then, we head back to the States, where McCall has set up a quiet life for himself in a tenement building. And it’s that McCall we pick up with this time around, taking out a group of bad guys on a train bound for Turkey in a neat, efficient, brutal credits re-establisher. At the end of the first movie, he became more recognisably the McCall of the TV show, a mercenary for hire, available to right wrongs for those whose wrongs have remained resolutely unrighted. Robert McCall, his retired black ops veteran, the sort of man who can kill you with a credit card, is the perfect vessel to peg a series on. At first glance, The Equalizer, Washington’s big-screen version of the beloved Ewah Woowah ’80s TV show, may seem a strange choice of project with which to pop his franchise cherry. ![]()
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