Or else he’s working his job as a Lyft driver, discreetly listening in on phone conversations and arguments, his life a composite of other people’s lives. When he’s not taking someone down, McCall is reading a book: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, perhaps, or the $40 hardbound special edition of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time he just had special-ordered. agent who lacks the bristling mysteriousness of Keanu Reeves’s John Wick or the go-get-’em doggedness of Liam Neeson’s Bryan Mills, hero of the Taken franchise. Yet this is familiar territory for everyone involved, a kitchen sink of a film that overflows with ideas but gets clogged before the payoff.Denzel Washington is back, in The Equalizer 2, as the quiet, bookish, lethal Robert McCall, an ex-C.I.A. THE EQUALIZER 2 could have been the start of a proper cinematic franchise for Washington, or an opportunity for the 63-year-old actor to carve out a Liam Neeson-esque niche in the thriller landscape. Leo is terrific in her handful of scenes, but Bill Pullman is criminally underused. Similarly, for the first 45 minutes Washington is left spinning his wheels and polishing a series of emblematic apples. However, Wenk’s screenplay keeps the story branches so separated for the first half of the film that poor Miles merely becomes a plot device until needed. Washington continues his role as the avuncular assassin, exchanging his protection of Chloë Grace Moretz for another troubled teen. It’s one of several tense and surprisingly bloodthirsty action set-pieces that remind us of McCall’s inability to not be beat. What Wenk and Fuqua retain from the original is an underlying tension, with a literal building storm flagged early in the film, one that leads our hero to a coastal shootout while being buffeted by driving winds and rain. Indeed, there’s a whole subplot about a Holocaust survivor looking for his lost family for some reason. Punctuated by references to Between the World and Me, award-winning writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’ missive to his son, it winds up being one of several threads that elongate the first act. On one hand, there’s a potentially powerful narrative about McCall steering young painter Miles ( Moonlight‘s Ashton Sanders) away from the gang life. However, when tragedy strikes his friend Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo), his particular set of skills are unleashed on the unsuspecting bad guys.ĭespite the thriller trappings, returning screenwriter Richard Wenk ( Jack Reacher: Never Go Back). Quietly helping out neighbourhood folks and rescuing kidnapped children in Turkey, he makes do by driving for Lyft and being kind to strangers. We know this because he’s read almost 100 books. His character of retired CIA operative Robert McCall is a smart cookie. Nevertheless, Antoine Fuqua’s film is the first time Washington has been able to explore a role at length since his 137 episodes of St. It’s not that he appears to be against the franchise factory, as the Oscar-winning actor has turned up in remakes The Taking of Pelham 123 and The Magnificent Seven over the last decade. In one of those weird Hollywood quirks, of which there are too many to count, THE EQUALIZER 2 represents actor Denzel Washington’s first sequel. There’s at least 4 different movies going on here.
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