The Equalizer 2
It makes us forget we’re watching a movie. Blood soaks the screen and we can’t breathe. Without a doubt, impressive in the crime-action genre.

Director: Antoine Fuqua
Lead Cast: Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Ashton Sanders
Screenwriter: Richard Wenk
Producers: Todd Black, Jason Blumenthal, Tony Eldridge, Antoine Fuqua, Mace Neufeld, Alex Siskin, Michael Sloan, Steve Tisch, Denzel Washington
Editor: Conrad Buff IV
Musical Director: Harry Gregson-Williams
Cinematographer: Oliver Wood
Genre: Crime, Action
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Location: Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Running Time: 2 hrs
Technical assessment: 3.5 ★★★✬✩
Moral assessment: 2.5 ★★✬✩✩
CINEMA rating: V16
MTRCB rating: R13

A driver takes us from point A to point B. If he’s a Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) of the on-demand transport service Lyft, he’ll do much more than that. He’ll exterminate the men who raped his female passenger. He’ll find the long-lost sister of an old man who survived the Holocaust. He’ll pirouette a young man named Miles (Ashton Sanders) from drugs and gangs to painting and reading. And if in the most calamitous of all missteps, someone murders his one best friend Susan (Melissa Leo), McCall will uncage all his vigilante fury until everyone responsible is wiped out. Susan and McCall had worked in a government intelligence agency before McCall’s wife was killed and he disappeared (he supposedly died), while Susan went on to private practice. She was investigating the murder-suicide of another intelligence agent, and was close to solving the case when she was killed. McCall seeks the help of former colleague and current associate of Susan’s, Dave York (Pedro Pascal) to track down the killer.

Equalizer 2 makes us forget we’re watching a movie. We hear a shooter’s heavy breathing and we flinch when his dilated pupils stare at us. Blood soaks the screen and we can’t breathe. And when McCall speaks, we recognize melancholy, affection and rage beneath a calibrated monotone that is distinctly Denzel Washington’s. Not for young audiences, but yes for adults who will find this second partnership between Washington and director Antoine Fuqua a notch above the first Equalizer. Sure it’s the same theme and same M.O. We would even say Pedro Pascal’s character is predictable. But the confluence of action, suspense, and sound set in the quaint neighborhoods of New England and the sea suffuses the movie with a good formula for foreboding.

Without a doubt, Equalizer 2 in the crime-action genre is impressive. But it treads on dangerous waters. How do we right a wrong? If justice is our plea, how far would we go to exact it? McCall’s vigilantism and summary execution are outside the law, they’re above it. And in a civilization that for thousands of years has plowed to establish the rule of law, Equalizer 2 not only demolishes respect for life, it also emboldens brutality and violence. The movie shows the gratifying results of vigilantism: a young girl is abducted by her own father to get back at the mother, McCall slays him, daughter and mother are reunited. Glorious! But what about the slain? They’re unnecessary and expendable lives, and the world is a much better place without them. The very same narrative invoked in a certain war on drugs. On the big screen as in real life, it takes a mature community of people to weigh the repercussions and underpinnings of this beguiling strain of swift justice. — MOE


