I Watch Films: The Equalizer 2
After the events of The Equalizer Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) is a ride-share driver for Lyft in Boston, and on the side he does some equalizin’ (vigilante work). We see him return a girl from Turkey where her father kidnapped her, help a Holocaust survivor work on getting a painting of his sister returned to him, take an assaulted woman to hospital and beat up the men who did it. The garden and a mural in his apartment block courtyard is vandalised; he pays Miles (Ashton Sanders) a young black man who lives in the block to repaint it.
In his equalizin' he’s aided by Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo), a friend and former DIA officer; with her contacts she smooths things over such as getting the girl back in the country. She’s called back to work to investigate a murder-suicide of an agent and his wife in Brussels, with Dave York (Pedro Pascal) McCall’s former partner. Having realised that there’s more to the case than it seems, Plummer is murdered. McCall investigates, realises her murder isn’t the robbery-gone-wrong it appears to be. He contacts York, who thinks he’s dead, and tells him this. In between all this he gets Miles out of trouble, he’s hanging with some drug dealers.
Someone then gets in his Lyft and attempts to kill him. McCall then calls on York and confronts him; York comes clean and explains that after McCall faked his death and the team were disbanded by the DIA they went into business for themselves as a team of assassins. Unfortunately Plummer figured it out and would have exposed them. McCall tells the team he will kill them; as York’s wife and child are present he’s able to leave.
The assassins attempt to target Plummer’s husband; McCall has already got him away. They target McCall but instead find Miles, who McCall has been mentoring, and take him as bait. They head for his hometown, where his wife died, guessing that’s where he’ll be. The hurricane that has been threatened throughout the last half of the film arrives, and the town, a seaside New England place, has been evacuated, where they have the final confrontation.
Equalizer 2 – this time it’s personal? But the whole point of the Equalizer is that it’s always personal. McCall doesn’t have to walk outside his own life, his own city, even his own apartment block, to find injustice, someone who could do with having the odds equalized for them. Putting him up against a team of assassins who know him is interesting, it certainly feels more of an equal fight than him taking down regular evil guys or gangsters who underestimate him. Yet in the end I don’t know that this gives us anything other than another Equalizer film. Which is fine.
Watch This: Denzel Washington takes on the bad guys, putting
his thumb on the scales, mentors a young man
Don’t Watch This: A lot of dubious spies get murdered by
even worse hitmen
For A Variety Of Reasons: I managed to watch the Equalizer
trilogy out of order; the review of The Equalizer 3 is at the link.
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