Review of The Equalizer 2 (2018) by Dimitri H — 11 Aug 2018

Equalizer 2 does its part in supplying the brutal action you'd expect from a movie like this but hurts itself in its plot development.

This movie is more significant than it may first appear as it is the first time Denzel Washington has done a sequel, for the first time ever he returns to play a character. Washington matches if not tops his performance from the first movie, with moments of brilliance splattered across the film. Another strong performance came from Moonlight's Ashton Sanders, who plays Miles, someone who wants to be an artist but finds himself in the wrong crowd and has Denzel Washington take him under his wing. The rest of the cast ended up fitting around Washington just fine.

Equalizer 2, similar to its predecessor, does action right: it's fast, it's violent, and each punch and broken bone is felt; there are moments of suspense where you're not quite sure how everything will end up or who will survive. For the most part, this film holds back no punches. The biggest problem here is the distance between each action sequence and how long the movie takes to get going. There is a lot of tedious build up where the movie semi-sets up its characters and villains; too many shots of McCall being a Lyft driver or of city time-lapses slow the movie down. When action isn't going on, the movie isn't all that interesting and so there were times where I simply felt bored. This problem occurred with the first film as well but wasn't as apparent. Another thing I noticed was how copy and paste this film was from the first one. While new characters and locations, events which happened in the first happen again but with the film's new counterparts. There is a young troubled person whom Robert McCall looks to save and at the end he sets up a bunch of traps for the baddies after him. There are a couple of twists and directions taken I didn't expect and I appreciate those, but otherwise the movie feels very much like the first.

If you liked the first Equalizer, you will definitely like this movie too. But I wouldn't say both movies are equal, giving the original the slight edge almost purely out of freshness.