Denzel Washington had never starred in a sequel before. That is the fact that hangs over The Equalizer 2, and it lands with a dull thud once you see what he chose. Antoine Fuqua’s 2018 follow-up to the 2014 hit brings back Robert McCall, the retired DIA officer and Marine Corps veteran who hands out rough justice to people who cannot get it anywhere else. The first film was lean. This one runs 121 minutes and spends most of them looking for a reason to exist.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Robert McCall Is Driving Again
The setup is the same. McCall works as a driver, and he assists the less fortunate on the side. His close friend and former DIA colleague Susan Plummer, played again by Melissa Leo, feeds him information. McCall travels to Istanbul, disguised as a bearded Turkish man, to retrieve a 9-year-old girl kidnapped by her father. He returns her to her mother, who owns a bookstore he frequents.
It is a good scene. It is also the whole movie in miniature: a self-contained rescue that has nothing to do with the plot that follows. The film keeps promising a pattern and then refusing to build one.
A Holocaust Survivor and a Mural
Back home, McCall helps Sam Rubinstein, an elderly Holocaust survivor played by Orson Bean. Sam wants to recover a painting of his long-dead sister. Bean, in his final film role, gives the part a quiet dignity the rest of the film does not earn.
McCall also finds his apartment courtyard vandalized. He accepts an offer from Miles Whittaker, a troubled teenager with artistic talent, to paint a mural on the walls. Ashton Sanders plays Miles, and the film keeps insisting this relationship matters without ever showing why.
Then there is Amy, a young passenger who shows signs of having been drugged and assaulted. McCall takes her to the hospital, then returns to brutally beat the men who attacked her. The scene has real menace. It is also, again, disconnected from everything else.
Susan Plummer Goes to Brussels
Here the film finally starts. Susan and DIA officer Dave York, McCall’s former partner, are called to investigate the murder-suicide of an agency affiliate and his wife in Brussels. Susan is accosted in her hotel room and killed during what looks like a robbery.
McCall determines that the fatal knifing was too expert to be random. Susan was targeted. The murder-suicide was staged. This is the one stretch of The Equalizer 2 where the pieces click, and it clicks because Melissa Leo is gone and the film suddenly has a hole in it.
Pedro Pascal and the Phone
McCall reveals to Dave that he is still alive and tells him what he found. Pedro Pascal plays Dave with a smile that never quite reaches his eyes, and the film does not hide where this is going. When an assassin posing as a passenger attacks McCall, McCall kills him and retrieves his mobile phone. Dave’s number is on the call list.
McCall confronts Dave at his home. Dave confesses that their unit was disbanded by the government soon after McCall’s supposed death. He and the rest of the team became contract killers. He says he killed Susan.
There is no equal.
That is the tagline, and it is doing a lot of work the screenplay does not.
The Fourth Washington-Fuqua Film
The Equalizer 2 is the fourth collaboration between Washington and Fuqua, after Training Day in 2001, The Equalizer in 2014, and The Magnificent Seven in 2016. It is also the second installment of a trilogy that now includes The Equalizer 3, released on September 1, 2023.
Talks of a sequel began seven months before the first film came out. The project was officially announced in April 2015. Filming began in September 2017 in Boston and other parts of Massachusetts. None of that history shows on screen. What shows on screen is a film built backward from a reunion.
What Actually Works
The action is competent. Fuqua knows how to stage a beating, and Washington knows how to take one without flinching. The Istanbul rescue has a real pulse. The hospital revenge has weight. The Brussels sequence is genuinely unsettling.
The problem is that none of it accumulates. The Equalizer 2 is a series of set pieces with a revenge plot bolted on top, and the revenge plot is the least interesting thing in it.
Here is the ranking of what the film has, best to worst:
- Denzel Washington’s presence, which is load-bearing and always has been.
- Melissa Leo’s Susan Plummer, who gives the first act a spine.
- Orson Bean’s Sam Rubinstein, a small part with real feeling.
- The Istanbul rescue, a clean self-contained job.
- The Brussels murder, the one mystery worth solving.
- Ashton Sanders as Miles, wasted on a subplot that goes nowhere.
- Pedro Pascal as Dave York, a villain who announces himself.
- The finale, which is loud and long and means nothing.
A Sequel Without a Reason
The first Equalizer had a premise: a man with a very particular set of skills, living quietly, pulled back into violence by people who deserved it. That premise does not need a second film. It especially does not need a second film that kills its best supporting character in the first hour and then asks you to care about a teenager painting a wall.
Washington has said yes to a lot of things. He had never said yes to a sequel before this one. That he chose this script is the most interesting thing about The Equalizer 2, and not in a good way. The film grossed $190 million worldwide and received mixed reviews. Commercial success is not the same as a reason to exist.
The Equalizer 3 arrived five years later. That is the tell. This was never a story that needed telling twice. It was a franchise that needed feeding.
The Score
The Equalizer 2 is not a bad night at the movies. It is a forgettable one. Washington is watchable in anything, and Fuqua can stage a fight. But a film that spends 121 minutes proving it has nothing new to say about a character it already said everything about is a film that should have stayed unmade.
The first Equalizer earned its violence. The second one just spends it. A sequel should justify its own existence, and this one never bothers to try. It is a reunion tour, not a movie.
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