BACK in 2014, director Antoine Fuqua did a pretty damn good job of updating what was a distinctly 1980s TV character for modern audiences into a quite hard-hitting, creatively violent vigilante justice tale which saw the one and only Denzel Washington take up the mantel from the late Edward Woodward.
The first film spent much of the runtime building up the mythos of retired Defense Intelligence Operative Robert McCall, highlighting the contrast between his relatively laidback, everyday demeanour and his deadly abilities when he chooses to exact his own brand of justice.
This sequel (believe it or not Washington’s first ever) dives straight into what makes him such a force to be reckoned with: an opening sequence on a train in Turkey sets the tone of ferocious retribution-in-waiting for the rest of the film. “There are two types of pain,” he calmly explains to a kidnapper he’s tracked down. “Pain that hurts and pain that alters.”
Back home in Boston, McCall lives a perceivably normal life on his own in an apartment, helping out his neighbours and working as a driver to pay the bills. When not doing that, he continues to dispense justice on the types of lowlife criminals who seem to repeatedly get away with preying on the vulnerable, doing a much better job than this year’s awful Death Wish of exploring what it means to take the law into your own hands.
Following his job in Turkey, which saw him return a little girl to her frantic mother, Frank is reunited with two former associates from his days of covert government work – Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo) and Dave York (Pedro Pascal). After Susan is horrendously attacked, seemingly because she was getting too close to the truth of an international case, Frank must put his special skills to use once again to find the culprits.
Returning director Fuqua teams up with Washington for the fourth time (following Training Day, The Magnificent Seven and the first Equalizer) and there’s clearly something there that just clicks.
They give the action a sense of stylistic oomph that would be missing from many other sequels that would instead simply coast by on autopilot. Despite a bizarrely muddled late-stage set-piece taking place in the chaos of a seaside storm, the action scenes make a wince-including impact and are even more impressive when you take into account that Washington is now 63 years old.
This helps paper over some of the cracks brought about by the film often tying itself up in unnecessary knots with conspiratorial twists and turns that will surprise no-one but absolute newcomers to the genre – as is the wont with these sorts of things, the reveal of the bad guy can be seen coming a mile off.
It also does an admirable job of humanising the central character so that he’s more than just a cold and detached executioner. This empathy comes in a subplot involving McCall deciding to help troubled teenager Miles (Moonlight star Ashton Sanders) steer away from the gang life he feels destined for and instead nourish his obvious artistic abilities.
That sense of compassion mixed with Washington’s natural cool charisma grounds the central character with a compelling complexity in the face of what is quite an outlandish persona. While the film overall isn’t as strong as the first outing, it has a one-of-a-kind star front and centre and in allowing him to do his thing, we get a sequel that’s uncommonly worthwhile.
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