"The Equalizer 2": review

Coming out four years after its 2014 predecessor, 2018's "The Equalizer 2" is once again directed by Antoine Fuqua.  The actioner stars Denzel Washington as Robert McCall, a government-trained agent and former US Marine who uses his training to right wrongs in and around his neighborhood.  While the story is loaded with subplots, the main plot is dead simple:  McCall loses his best friend, a former agent who gets killed in Belgium, and when McCall realizes the people who killed her were his own former teammates back when he was an active agent, it's all about revenge.  The film takes a while to get to this point, though:  the best friend isn't killed until about halfway through the story, and the discovery of the true killers doesn't happen until some time after that, leaving us with little time for the revenge arc itself.  I've already seen plenty of critics complain about what they perceived as lazy, desultory pacing, but for myself, I think I actually liked "The Equalizer 2" better than the first movie.

Let's talk about some of those subplots, which are the reason why I like this film.  In one side story, McCall does what he can to help Sam, an old Jewish man (Orson Bean), reconnect with his long-lost sister Magda (Gloria Papert).  Another subplot involves McCall, in his capacity as a Lyft driver, taking a drugged, injured young woman to the hospital, then finding the young men who abused her and beating the shit out of them.  Early in the story, McCall goes to Turkey to track down an abusive husband who has kidnapped his daughter to punish his American wife.  In McCall's neighborhood, a woman named Fatima (Sakina Jaffrey) discovers her vegetable garden has been vandalized, and the walls of the buildings in her apartment complex (where McCall lives) have been spray-painted with graffiti.  It's while he's preparing to paint over the graffiti that McCall meets young Miles (the excellent Ashton Sanders), a teenaged aspiring artist who wants a career in art but who also has one foot in the local gang culture—a quicker route to money.  McCall begins to take a fatherly interest in Miles.

While all this is going on, McCall's best friend Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo), supposedly retired from government work, hears about an agency associate who has died along with his wife in Belgium.  Susan travels to Belgium with a retinue of agents, including Dave York (Pedro Pascal).  During the inspection of the crime scene, Susan makes certain discoveries that ought not to have been made, and when Dave is no longer by her side, she is assaulted by a group of street toughs who shout at her in French for money.  Cut to the next scene, and Susan's writer husband Brian (Bill Pullman) is being consoled about her death.  McCall asks Dave York, who used to be part of McCall's team back when McCall was active DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), to pull some electronic files so that McCall can go over Susan's murder himself.  Meanwhile, it turns out that the street toughs who beat Susan up had been hired to do so, and some unknown party kills them by planting a bomb in their apartment building.  Going on very little forensic evidence, McCall manages to figure out that the toughs had beaten Susan up, but they hadn't been the ones who'd killed her:  the killing blow had been delivered by someone trained as an assassin.

I don't want to reveal too much more because the movie, at this point, hinges on a massive plot twist, but suffice it to say that McCall eventually figures out that Susan's killer is DIA.  From that point on, "The Equalizer 2" becomes a fairly standard action movie as McCall takes down the guilty parties one by one.

The very thing that other critics complained about—the numerous subplots—struck me as the thing that made this movie so appealing.  McCall is fleshed out as a character as we watch him interact with people from different walks of life—rescuing a little girl from her abusive Turkish dad, helping Holocaust survivor Sam track down his sister, helping Fatima with her garden and the graffiti, helping an innocent young woman who had been drugged and assaulted find some measure of justice, and most important, helping Miles realize that going the gangster route is exactly the wrong path through life.  This movie, more than the previous one, revels in its subplots and thereby aligns itself more closely with the 1980s-era TV show upon which it's based.  I didn't mind at all that the plot took a long time to coalesce; who doesn't enjoy an opportunity to watch Denzel Washington just act?  Call it a slow-burn actioner, if that's not a contradiction in terms:  until the final reel, the violence in "The Equalizer 2" is sporadic but intense, punctuating a meandering plot that sprawls in several directions.

One scene in particular surprised me:  McCall sees, out his kitchen window, that Miles gets surrounded by gang members and is driven off somewhere.  McCall figures out where Miles has gone:  a nasty part of the neighborhood that's totally controlled by the local gang.  In an interior shot, we see Miles being given the assignment of killing some rival gang members... and that's when McCall bursts in and gets Miles out.  But that's not why I liked the scene:  what happens next is what caught my attention.  Miles angrily pulls himself away from McCall's protective grasp, and the two argue about Miles's future.  McCall asks Miles if he really wants to go the gangster route instead of the artist's route, then he hands Miles one of his pistols and tells the kid to shoot McCall in the head.  Miles wilts, unable to pull the trigger, and McCall—summoning all the repressed emotion that comes from killing a long line of bad guys—shouts at Miles that the kid has no idea what death is, and that Miles needs to take advantage of his gifts and opportunities while he's still alive.*  I came into "The Equalizer 2" thinking I'd be watching more of the same, just an extension of the first movie.  I didn't expect to find myself with my throat tight and tears in my eyes as this scene played out.  Full credit to director Antoine Fuqua for getting this scene just right.

Speaking of getting scenes right:  you may recall, back when I reviewed "The Equalizer" in 2015, that I had complained about Fuqua's direction of action sequences.  This time around, I have to say that Fuqua did just about everything right:  the action was clear and comprehensible, and Fuqua managed to ratchet up the tension even though we, the audience, know full well how things are going to end for the bad guys.

So, yes:  overall, I enjoyed this movie more than the first one, the other critics be damned.  If you're the impatient type who wants to cut straight to the killing, then "The Equalizer 2" isn't for you.  If, by contrast, you're into patiently sculpted character development and a plot that takes its time coalescing, then I think you'll enjoy this film.  Hats off to Melissa Leo for her heartfelt performance as McCall's ill-fated best friend Susan, and a big thumbs-up to Ashton Sanders in his role as young artist Miles.  Sanders has the unenviable task of acting toe-to-toe with the legendary Denzel Washington, and he manages to more than hold his own.  

Now go get your dose of Denzel.

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*You can watch the intense scene here.