Yeah, I’m back. I’ve been travelling a lot for the last month and haven’t had time to write reviews. Rest assured, I have found time to keep on my movie schedule and did see Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Antman & the Wasp and Skyscraper. To summarize those films: meh, meh, bleh and meh. But I was excited about getting back on schedule in a positive way with a sequel to a movie that I like well enough. Unfortunately, The Equalizer 2 takes everything that works about the first film and sets it on fire.
Denzel Washington returns in the first sequel of his career (I’m still waiting for Fallen 2, but I think that ship has sailed) as Robert McCall, a retired special ops soldier or something. He’s a badass, whatever he is. What was endearing about the first film is that this character really wants nothing to do with anything that’s thrown at him. The dude just wants to work his shift at Home Depot and then go home and read a book, but assholes keep throwing a wrench into that plan by fucking with the normal, good people in his life and he steps up to help them (hence the title of the film). That scenario is pretty much thrown out the window a third of the way into this sequel. Instead, his politician friend is murdered by some former soldiers that have turned into hitmen and he goes after them.
It’s probably not a coincidence that most of the footage in the trailers is from the first act of the movie because that’s when it actually feels like the first movie. Some normal people hire him to get them out of trouble and he does so in ass-kicking fashion. The transition to the politician/military hitmen plotline is both jarring and disappointing, as it changes the tone and purpose of the character. It’s no longer just a guy trying to help, but a more typical soldier vs. soldier action flick that feels more like a Jack Reacher movie than it does The Equalizer. Oddly, though, it also maintains the slow-burn pacing of the first film, resulting in a plodding two hours that exhausted my interest after 40 minutes. It’s not uncommon for an action series to change its focus as it goes along (see Death Wish or Rambo), but this movie seems unaware of the fact that it so drastically altered its core narrative and doesn’t adjust its tone accordingly. It’s fucking boring, in other words.
I was still prepared to merely give this movie an indifferent shoulder shrug, but then I experienced the dumbfuckery of the last 20 minutes of the movie. The first movie built up to a lengthy, bloody fight in a hardware store. This movie tries to copy that structure, but fails miserably. Instead of a hardware store, we now get a final fight on an island that is in the middle of a major hurricane. The characters purposefully go to the island in the middle of the hurricane, by the way. It wasn’t a mistake or something that might make you think that these people aren’t fucking morons. But the real problem, the thing that pissed me off and I could not get around, is the goddamn computer effects. You see, the filmmakers didn’t try to create the effect of a storm in a practical way. They couldn’t even wait for actual rain. No, most of this storm is created using computer-generated rain and wind and by tinting the film grey. They couldn’t even bother making the actors wet, as they stand in the middle of a pounding storm without an ounce of water on them. It’s really a stunning monument to shitty filmmaking and human laziness. You couldn’t spray the fucking actors with water? A goddamn spray bottle wasn’t in the budget? It may sound like nitpicking, but I couldn’t focus well on the movie when I couldn’t fathom the half-assed way that this thing was filmed.
This isn’t awful, but it’s also not worth your time. Denzel Washington is still solid, but the villains and supporting characters are forgettable, the plot is generic and the special effects are soul-crushingly lazy. It’s somewhat stunning that this is the sequel that Washington finally said “yes” to after all of these years, because this is one big pile of forgettable, indifferent nonsense. Maybe I will finally get Fallen 2, but now I’m not so sure that I want it.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Equalizer_2#/media/File:The_Equalizer_2_poster.jpg
