It’s great you’re helping all these random people and everything, but it’s not going to fill that hole in your heart.

The Equalizer 2

(2018)

(SPOILERS) I was going to suggest The Equalizer 2 is to The Equalizer (2014) as Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is to Jack Reacher, but then I remembered Jack Reacher is pretty good, and The Equalizer is just okay. Denzel broke his no-sequels rule for this?

Richard Wenk returns on screenplay duties – he also contributed to Never Go Back, which is telling, and the previous Fuqua/Washington team-up The Magnificent Seven– and dutifully returns to the beats of the frequently sluggish not-so-original. The difference here is that for much of the proceedings there’s little sense of flow or pace. The first hour seems like a borderline random succession of incidents, some of which you know will have importance, others designed to build our sense of McCall's calling and all-round-great-guy persona.

The opening scene briefly suggests a sense of humour these movies – and Fuqua's generally – rarely show much propensity for, arriving armed with Denzel in Muslim disguise as he seeks to rescue a kidnapped daughter. I'd have loved to see McCall in a succession of oddball outfits à la Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther as he equalizes those bringing harm to his "clients" (I’m not sure he ever gets paid, judging by this; rather, he "touts" for business through his day job as a Lyft driver and takes it upon himself to help whether asked to or not). Later, surrounded by bad guys/ex-colleagues after he visits his old DIA partner-come-private-sector hitman-come-DIA-again Pedro Pascal – there's never any doubt Pascal is going to be revealed as in on the hit on McCall’s pal Melissa Leo; the twist would have been if he wasn't – he cheerfully hitches a lift with Pascal's oblivious wife and kids.

But the paceless sludge of clients – a Holocaust survivor trying to find a painting of his sister, a neighbourhood artist (Moonlight's Ashton Sanders, good in a cheesy role) prey to dealers and creeps – leaves the picture struggling for motivation, no matter whether individual scenes deliver (McCall dealing retribution to the men who drugged and raped an intern). As damaging is how corny it all is, failing to recognise the irony of a man whose vocation is dealing vigilante justice mentoring a kid on the path of the straight and narrow.

There's a nearly-decent scene when McCall confronts Pascal's Dave York, and the latter attempts to justify his choices, suggesting their previously "righteous" career together was only that because the government told them it was, but the movie isn't really interested in exploring such ideas seriously, hence one of the closing scenes in which Sanders shows a girl on the bus his designs for a superhero based on McCall; as I suggested in my review of the first movie, McCall is Batman (unlike Chuck Bronson or Bruce in the Death Wish remake, Washington escapes relatively lightly from charges of irresponsibility with this now-franchise).

As usual, Fuqua directs with personality-free slickness that extends to a finale invoking Witness; McCall invites his antagonists to an evacuated, storm-lashed town where he deals with them post-haste. It's rather lacklustre and all-too easy, particularly since York and his ruthless cohorts would surely have used captive Sanders as their bargaining chip from the first. Elsewhere, the director evidences his sub-Guy Ritchie eye with McCall planning out his takedowns in advance (close-ups of Denzel's mince pies being about the extent of it). Oh, and the brutality. Fuqua just loves it, with some particularly nasty depictions of the assassinations of an agent and his wife and then the attack on Leo.

Do we get an Equalizer 3?Well, The Equalizer 2 came in fairly cheap, and isn't significantly trailing the first movie for its gross, so I expect Denzel can add a solitary, forgettable little trilogy to his career legacy if he so wishes.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

She was addicted to Tums for a while.

Marriage Story (2019)
(SPOILERS) I don’t tend to fall heavily for Noah Baumbach fare. He’s undoubtedly a distinctive voice – even if his collaborations with Wes Anderson are the least of that director’s efforts – but his devotion to an exclusive, rarefied New York bubble becomes ever more off-putting with each new project. And ever more identifiable as being a lesser chronicler of the city’s privileged quirks than his now disinherited forbear Woody Allen, who at his peak mastered a balancing act between the insightful, hilarious and self-effacing. Marriage Story finds Baumbach going yet again where Woody went before, this time brushing up against the director’s Ingmar Bergman fixation.

You're not only wrong. You're wrong at the top of your voice.

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
I’ve seen comments suggesting that John Sturges’ thriller hasn’t aged well, which I find rather mystifying. Sure, some of the characterisations border on the cardboard, but the director imbues the story with a taut, economical backbone.

My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…

Haven’t you ever heard of the healing power of laughter?

Batman (1989)
(SPOILERS) There’s Jaws, there’s Star Wars, and then there’s Batman in terms of defining the modern blockbuster. Jaws’ success was so profound, it changed the way movies were made and marketed. Batman’s marketing was so profound, it changed the way tentpoles would be perceived: as cash cows. Disney tried to reproduce the effect the following year with Dick Tracy, to markedly less enthusiastic response. None of this places Batman in the company of Jaws as a classic movie sold well, far from it. It just so happened to hit the spot. As Tim Burton put it, it was “more of a cultural phenomenon than a great movie”. It’s difficult to disagree with his verdict that the finished product (for that is what it is) is “mainly boring”.

Now, of course, the Burton bat has been usurped by the Nolan incarnation (and soon the Snyder). They have some things in common. Both take the character seriously and favour a sombre tone, which was much more of shock to the system when Burton did it (even…

How do you like that – Cuddles knew all the time!

The Pleasure Garden (1925)
(SPOILERS) Hitchcock’s first credit as director, and his account of the production difficulties, as related to Francois Truffaut, is by and large more pleasurable than The Pleasure Garden itself. The Italian location shoot in involved the confiscation of undeclared film stock, having to recast a key role and borrowing money from the star when Hitch ran out of the stuff.

He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
(1982)
(SPOILERS) I don’t love Star Trek, but I do love Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That probably isn’t just me, but a common refrain of many a non-devotee of the series. Although, it used to apply to The Voyage Home (the funny one, with the whales, the Star Trek even the target audience for Three Men and a Baby could enjoy). Unfortunately, its high regard has also become the desperate, self-destructive, song-and-verse, be-all-and-end-all of the overlords of the franchise itself, in whichever iteration, it seems. This is understandable to an extent, as Khan is that rare movie sequel made to transcendent effect on almost every level, and one that stands the test of time every bit as well (better, even) as when it was first unveiled.

She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

Anything can happen in Little Storping. Anything at all.

The Avengers 2.22: Murdersville
Brian Clemens' witty take on village life gone bad is one of the highlights of the fifth season. Inspired by Bad Day at Black Rock, one wonders how much Murdersville's premise of unsettling impulses lurking beneath an idyllic surface were set to influence both Straw Dogs and The Wicker Mana few years later (one could also suggest it premeditates the brand of backwoods horrors soon to be found in American cinema from the likes of Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper).

It looks like we’ve got another schizoid embolism!

Total Recall (1990)
(SPOILERS) Paul Verhoeven offered his post-mortem on the failures of the remakes of Total Recall (2012) and Robocop (2013) when he suggested “They take these absurd stories and make them too serious”. There may be something in this, but I suspect the kernel of their issues is simply filmmakers without either the smarts or vision, or both, to make something distinctive from the material. No one would have suggested the problem with David Cronenberg’s prospective Total Recall was over-seriousness, yet his version would have been far from a quip-heavy Raiders of the Lost Ark Go to Mars (as he attributes screenwriter Ron Shusset’s take on the material). Indeed, I’d go as far as saying not only the star, but also the director of Total Recall (1990) were miscast, making it something of a miracle it works to the extent it does.

The President is dead. You got that? Somebody’s had him for dinner.

Escape from New York (1981)
(SPOILERS) There’s a refreshingly simplicity to John Carpenter’s nightmare vision of 1997. Society and government don’t represent a global pyramid; they’re messy and erratic, and can go deeply, deeply wrong without connivance, subterfuge, engineered rebellions or recourse to reset. There’s also a sense of playfulness here, of self-conscious cynicism regarding the survival prospects for the US, as voiced by Kurt Russell’s riff on Clint Eastwood anti-heroics in the decidedly not dead form of Snake Plissken. But in contrast to Carpenter’s later Big Trouble in Little China (where Russell is merciless to the legend of John Wayne), Escape from New York is underpinned by a relentlessly grim, grounded aesthetic, one that lends texture and substance; it remains one of the most convincing and memorable of dystopian visions.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog