1/23/2024 0 Comments Equalizer 2 review![]() ![]() The two-time Oscar winner is able to tap into his own surplus of moral righteousness even when the script is pulling the carpet out from under him. Regardless, Washington is a pleasure to watch on the screen. His eyes are dead but his mind is always working he is at once inured to the violence he commits and thrilled by the efficiency with which he commits it. Indeed, for much of the movie Washington seems like he’s in a somnambulant or at least dreamlike state. The final showdown at the abandoned and hurricane-ravaged beach town where McCall once lived with his long ago dead wife is drawn out and psychologically strange: it feels like The Gunfight at the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Corral. ![]() (As a result of his friendship with McCall, Miles gets to be a hostage for the final part of the film). In the meantime, he finds time to mentor a young artist in his building named Miles (the talented Ashton Sanders, who played teen Chiron in Moonlight), luring him away from street life by introducing him to good works and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. Her death is part of a series of double-crosses that are murky as plot points but give McCall his purpose in the film: hunt down and kill the guys who did it in various grotesque ways. It involves the overseas murder of his one friend, the operative Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo, returning from the first film along with Bill Pullman, who plays her husband). ![]() ![]() The centerpiece story is comparatively less compelling. Starring: Denzel Washington, Pablo Pascal, Melissa Leo, Ashton Sanders, Bill Pullman, Tamara Hickey and Orson Bean The best parts of the movie are these comparatively smaller assignments he undertakes on behalf of the besieged: recovering a stolen painting that belonged to a Holocaust survivor, rescuing the child of an independent book dealer from an estranged partner, breaking various limbs of some douchey businessmen who drugged and assaulted an intern, etc. It also provides a perfect cover-and inspiration for-his secret side hustle (not that it pays anything) as the Bay State’s deadliest task rabbit. Having left his job at the East Boston hardware store where he once worked (that tends to happen when you kill bunch of people in your place of business), McCall now makes due as a Lyft driver, a job that allows him to interact briefly but intimately with a wide swath of humanity. Let’s face it: without principles, Washington’s Robert McCall is essentially a Jason Voorhees who has traded in his hockey mask for a leather driving cap. Once the title character is separated from the absolute moral authority he wielded in the first film, the spell is broken, or at least less enchanting. These changes are important in a movie where the protagonist specializes in grotesque ways of offing people (Why use a gun to kill a guy when you can use a harpoon?) and the director soaks his frames in each act of violence as if it were a dish of Palmolive. Rather than righting universal wrongs, he’s basically just out for vengeance. The lead character’s intentions have shifted as well. This time, instead of tattooed Russian mobsters, the central bad guys are deep state equivocators, government operatives who are good or evil-depending on their mission. ![]()
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