Director: Antoine Fuqua
Production Company: Columbia Pictures, Escape Artists, Zhiv Productions, Mace Neufield Productions, Picture Farm
Country: USA
Year: 2018
The first Equalizer film obviously did well at the box office, and for good reason. It was a solid, if imperfect, action movie that held up well against its main competition in John Wick. Now Denzel Washington’s Robert McCall is back, this time helping out a young artist in the neighbourhood whilst occasionally taking out violent criminals that happen to cross his path. You know. The usual. Only this time, Pedro Pascal is in the film.
The main issue with The Equalizer 2 is that, whereas relative restraint helped the first film, with everything kept from spiraling out into big government conspiracies and globetrotting madness (to a certain extent), a second film needs to very subtly up the stakes. You don’t have to go completely Dean Koontz on it, but there should be an upgrade in concept, if only by a fraction. Noticeable, but not gargantuan. The cold-open fight scene in Turkey gives it the feel that it’s going to do this, launching into the action right from the start now that we know McCall and how he works from movie 1, but then everything still keeps itself scaled down, relatively speaking. Sometimes films need to go back to basics, to stick to a more human story, to stop themselves getting outlandish (remember Fast 9 going into space?). This one needed to do something a little more, a bit different than the first.
Instead, the film plays it relatively safe and keeps the action low to the ground. Everything’s still quite domestic much of the time, still very intimate, and whilst ordinarily that’s a good thing, here it drags. The first half of the film is so incredibly dull that by the time we get to what’s actually happening in regards to a storyline, we’ve already switched off. It’s too slow.
Often I advocate for giving films time to breathe, time for scenes to play out and for characters to catch their breath. Equalizer, both the first film and this one, has occasions where they do this, and props to them for deciding to have some moments where they actually remember their characters are characters. Going balls-to-the-wall 24/7 rarely makes for an entertaining flick. Here, they’ve taken my advice but not read the room. Keep it slow when it needs to, but go all out when the time calls for it. Added to that, the final storyline is uninteresting and not especially entertaining, and you wind up with a film that feels long and slow and nowhere near the caliber of the first.
It’s not all bad news. Washington does his best and still manages to make McCall likeable despite us now knowing he’s incredibly proficient at violence to an almost absurdist degree, bordering on a superhero. Pascal is good in his role, and it’s nicely directed, with time taken to build suspense in the sequences where we need that build-up before everything blows open. We simply don’t care about pretty much any of it. If there was a better hook to get it going, something that really kept me interested, that might work. There’s an attempt, far too late into the film, and it doesn’t work.
The Equalizer 2 is mediocre at best, and a gun still firing on empty at worst.
Rating: 5/10
Review by Kieran Judge
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