Equalizer 2; the Sequeliser

I didn’t really like The Equalizer all that much, but I am encouraged to see that what I kind of liked in the first movie was what I kind of liked in the second one; Denzel’s Robet McCall is better company when he’s good humouredly watching the world around him and sticking his thumb on the scales from time to time to let the little guys get a little more than they might have coming. Everything else just underlines why making the Equalizer into a movie was a mistake. The Equalizer doesn’t do big movie length projects; he does small neighborhood stuff. Ramming a big plot into the movies just hammers home how much they should have stayed as episodic TV.

Still, Robert McCall’s breathtaking sadism is still firmly in place. Don’t kill anyone simply when you can hurt them a whole bunch beforehand. Reflecting on it afterward, I thought to be myself that Denzel could have made a movie which was the equal of his real talent by making McCall a sadistic sociopath who knew he was a problem, and rationed out his moments of sadism only when he felt like he’d earned them. Denzel would have been more than up to the job of someone doing the right thing precisely so that he could reward himself by doing the wrong thing.

Instead he just goes around hurting people in ways that I think are supposed to make the audience give an atavistic “yay!” as various button-pushing low-lifes get maimed or stabbed to bits because they’ve somehow fetched up on McCall’s radar. Quite why Boston PD isn’t hunting him down as a serial killer is never very clear. In one of the early fist-pumping sequences he goes all medieval on the asses of a bunch for frat boy lawyers who’ve raped an intern and then poured her into McCall’s Lyft taxi as though that was all the consideration she needed. He does not cotton to this, and comes back to give them some lessons in what pain feels like. And particularly in 2018, the sight of rapists getting maimed is sort of cathartic. But he leaves his witnesses alive, having told them he’s the Lyft driver who picked up the girl. He even makes a point of asking the last of them to leave him a five star rating. How does that NOT turn into a sub-poena fired off at Lyft to get his home address?

Still, Denzel’s easy going charm makes a lot of it work. One standout is the moment when he pulls the world’s most polite hostage-taking, walking off with the villain-in-chief’s wife and kids as if he’s just cadging a lift instead of taking them hostage to stop the villain and his mooks from stabbing him. It’s elegant, minimalist, classy and - when you think about it - really creepy.

But it’s just a wrong movie. And there’s one moment that tells you who the audience is supposed to be, and why they should all be on some kind of watch list. McCall takes on the last of the big bads in a small town during a hurricane, and one of his jinks takes him through a bakery. As he strolls through, he casually slashes open every flour sack in sight and turns on all the fans he can find. “Ah,” I said. “Expedient flour-air explosive.” And so it came to pass. This is a movie written to please the kind of people who think that they could improvise a bomb out of whatever they can find in their kitchens.