Wednesday, 5 September 2018

The Equalizer 2

I've not seen the first film of this series, but to a certain extent it doesn't seem to matter very much. Denzel Washington plays a Lyft-driving ex-secret-service paladin, helping out various people he encounters either through the former contacts he has or by using the brutal skills he'd learned in his prior employment. And when someone messes with one of those contacts, Denzel is sure to deliver a whole heaping load of whoop-ass revenge on them.

If I didn't know this was based on a TV show I probably would have guessed anyway - the multitudinous subplots feel very much typical TV - sorta "Touched by an Extremely Violent Angel". Washington has charm to get through the fairly contrived tearjerker subplots and he's old enough now to be in the "old-geezer" stage of his action career, playing closer to the Liam Neeson characters in numerous recent films. And this does mean that this isn't a film that's particulary in a rush to get anywhere in particular - the main plot-thread really doesn't get going for about half an hour, for instance. The climax, during a very-thoroughly-set-up storm, hits some strong action beats, but this is really a case of an action movie not trying particularly hard and not really getting far beyond second gear. Strangely, its extreme old-school conventionality makes it quite an odball film in the 2010s - it's emotional manipulations are quite shameless, but dammit if they don't work anyway. Denzel is really kinda slumming it here but without his charisma this would be a pretty empty excercise - as it is, it does at least give him a chance to show off why he's a movie star, dammit.

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