The Equalizer 2 (2018)

Warning: spoilers for pretty damn obvious revelations ahead!

Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) is still going about his very particular kind of vigilante business, now spending time as a Lyft driver to observe humanity, and, this viewer can’t help but think, find either some people in trouble, or people he can sadistically punish for making trouble for others.

Helping out the elderly, breaking the bones of rapists and scaring a kid from the apartment house McCall owns straight doesn’t quite make for the needed action quota – these aren’t the 1970s anymore – so one of McCall’s few genuine friends, CIA analyst Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo) is murdered. The deed at first appears to be a break-in gone wrong, but McCall soon enough figures out there’s actually a mildly complex conspiracy involved.

Some people from McCall’s intelligence wet work past are channelling their violence in much worse ways then our vigilante does, and Susan stumbled onto their trail. If you’re surprised that McCall’s former best bud and partner (Pedro Pascal) is one of them, you’ve never seen an action movie or thriller in your life.

I really didn’t get along with the first Equalizer movie, a movie that seemingly doesn’t realize that its hero is more of sadistic serial killer than your typical movie vigilante (who are typically already sadistic and murderous enough), and finds him being cruel incredibly cool. Someone seems to have explained things to director Antoine Fuqua in the meantime, however, for the second Equalizer goes out of its way to emphasise McCall as someone who uses violence as a means of protection much more than one of punishment. There’s still a degree of sadism to the way he goes about things but not more of it than is to be expected from a contemporary action movie, and the film doesn’t seem quite so in love with this aspect of the character as the first one was.

Atypically for a big budget action film made in the last couple of decades, The Equalizer 2 leaves a lot of space for emotion and character development demonstrated through calm and curiously quotidian – at least for the kind of person McCall is – interactions between our protagonist and the various people he encounters, helps out, or brutalizes. This does the film and its main character a world of good, because it builds actual relationships between him and the world he inhabits, and so puts effort into selling the good he does as much as his badassery/violent temper. From time to time, the film does stray in the direction of the Very Special Episode here, but thanks to Washington and a fine supporting cast, it never quite gets there.

This looser structure and calmer pace also demonstrate a side of director Antoine Fuqua I didn’t expect – an ability to focus on the important parts of human interactions and a degree of patience and restraint his filmmaking usually lacks. I really didn’t think this particular director had much beyond “able to get along with Denzel Washington” to offer, but turns out that, given the right material, he can make a genuinely good movie.

Even once the action starts, Fuqua eschews his typical showiness in favour of mostly controlled set-pieces that don’t need overwrought editing or obfuscating camerawork and instead draw much of their power from an ability to put the audience beside the characters in what feel like actual physical places, which to me is still one of the important elements of an effective action sequence.

Three Films Make A Post: Now You Will Believe…

Night Skies (2007): Like Manchester, The X-Files have so much to answer for. To wit, this alien abduction thing about an RV full of unlikeable twats getting molested by aliens while the Phoenix Lights are doing their little dance. Jason Connery also pops in as an ex-marine trucker, because why not.

The script is sluggish and dumb, the characters unlikeable but not interesting, and director Roy Knyrim directs like someone who started their career with an Insane Clown Posse video. Admittedly, the big – theoretically gory - abduction and probing sequence is pretty funny, but digging through this much crap to reach that tiny nugget of comedy gold would be cruel and unusual.

Satanic Hispanics (2022): This anthology movie by Hispanic horror directors starts strong with a wonderfully strange piece by Demián Rugna, but after that it continues through tales of boring competence and ill-timed attempts at doing comedy that want to be Sam Raimi but only ever reach the effect of a bad third generation carbon copy. It’s a particular shame because most of these directors – apart from Rugna, Alejandro Brugués, Mike Mendez, Gigi Saul Guerrero, and Eduardo Sánchez – have made much superior films.

The Equalizer 3 (2023): But hey, it’s not as if the third Equalizer were any better – it just cost much more money to make. The third movie returns to the unexamined sadism of the first one, the unwillingness to take a long, good look at its hypocritical and self-pitying protagonist, and Antoine Fuqua’s all too typical inability to make a stylistically coherent movie.

Not making any of this any better are showy but uncreative action sequences without flow, weight or a sense of fun, so there’s very little to recommend. Even Denzel Washington is letting the side down with a performance so vain and filled with ill-advised actor business (just take a good look at his use of a teabag during one dialogue scenes), this only needed more shots of pointless and heroic poses to reach Tom Cruise levels of embarrassment.

In short: Man on Fire (2004)

Creasy (Denzel Washington), an alcoholic ex-CIA killer with the mandatory traumatic past (therefore the alcohol) is hired to protect Lupita (Dakota Fanning), the child of US company exec Samuel (Marc Anthony) and his wife Lisa (Radha Mitchell). Despite there having been a rash of kidnappings of the children of executives of US companies in Mexico like Samuel, he really hires Creasy because he comes cheaply, and because Creasy’s old murder buddy Paul Rayburn (Christopher Walken) pushes the guy recommending people to Samuel a bit in Creasy’s direction.

After a bit of the expected “PTSD suffering guy can’t let anyone into his heart anymore” shenanigans, Creasy falls in replacement father love with Lupita (who, as played by Fanning, really is a particularly nice kid), so when she is kidnapped and apparently killed, he does of course go on a murderous rampage, killing his way up the long, long totem pole to the people responsible for her death.

At first, Tony Scott’s Man on Fire, written by Brian Helgeland, is a surprisingly effective retelling of the ole tale of a shut-off man of violence reminded of his humanity by a child, and then falling back into his old ways again to protect/save her. After some minutes of the kind of noisy visual bullshit typical of late period Scott, even the director seems to calm down a little about the whole thing, giving his excellent performers enough space to breathe life into the very clichéd set-up and even – gasp – using his love for all kinds of annoying technical tricks to enhance instead of destroy what the actors are trying to do. Why, for once in a Tony Scott movie, I even felt emotions coming on.

Alas, once the film gets going with Creasy murdering his way through the supporting cast, all of this stops. Scott loses himself, Washington’s performance and my attention through the use of all the phony visual nonsense he so dearly loved in this part of his career. So there’s an incessant barrage of whoosh-cutting, pointless superimposition of Washington’s face over Washington’s face (honestly, I have no idea why), a camera that randomly jitters and jerks, jumpy editing, micro-zooms, stutter and all imaginable kinds of pointless visual graft, all, I assume in service of keeping the audience awake through way too many scenes of Creasy torturing and murdering characters in various ways. As my imaginary readers know, I’m not exactly bothered by tasteless violence, but rather by the directorial assumption that this sort of thing used as much as in this film will somehow shock a viewer.


In fact, having a murder machine murder their way through personality-less goons can only keep one’s interest up when it is either very well staged (which is impossible with all actual action buried under all of Scott’s tacky direction ticks), carries some interesting resonance, or actually does something else needed for the film. In Man on Fire’s case, all the killing ever does is make the film way too long, until what should be a tight little 90 minute thriller becomes tedious two and a half hours of nothing but Scott editing into your face, which isn’t just an unpleasant time, but also time of your life you won’t ever get back.

Virtuosity (1995)

Welcome to the weird and wacky near future of yesterday. Former cop Parker Barnes (Denzel Washington) is serving a lengthy prison term for not only killing the terrorist and gang who had just murdered his wife and child but accidentally blowing away a couple of reporters too – and all this while missing an arm. I mention the arm so you don’t forget he now has a bionic arm he alas never uses like the Six Million Dollar Man did, but which will come in handy when the film’s climax needs to handwave away a bomb. Also, so you fully understand we are in the times of extra badass Denzel Washington here. Take that, Bruce Willis.

Anyway, Barnes has made a deal to shorten his sentence which results in him getting strapped into a VR machine thingy for some SCIENCE(!) business. In the VR world, he is pitted against evil AI SID 6.7 (Russell Crowe). SID isn’t just a sharp dresser in primary colours, we will later learn that his virtual brain is also fashioned after a couple hundred of history’s greatest mass murders and serial killers. Would you believe the guy who killed Barnes’s family is one of them? Now, you might ask yourself: what’s the point of the experiment at all? Why purposefully create an AI that’s basically The Joker? I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure the film doesn’t know either.

But I digress into the realm of logic and sanity. At the same time, in the world of the movie, SID convinces his creator (I think, again, I’m not sure the film knows) to trick a hapless tech geek into building SID a body made of nanites so he can escape from Planet VR into the real world. Poor tech geek believes he is helping create a body for the sexy virtual chess program he is rather, ahem, fond of, by the way.

Obviously, SID really gets a body and manages to escape and goes on a bit of a rampage, composing a sampler symphony out of the screams of his victims. This is not a metaphor. Clearly, Barnes is the only one who can stop SID. Why? I have no idea, and neither has the script. Be that as it may, Barnes, for reasons unknown teamed up with psychologist Madison Carter (Kelly Lynch), is indeed promised his freedom if he manages to find and destroy SID.

Quickly, the film decides that it’s best that SID starts fixating on Barnes because the personality of the guy who killed Barnes’s family surfaces, and a duel of wits (I kid), guns and explosions ensues. There’s also a particularly idiotic subplot where SID successfully frames Barnes for murder, kidnapped children, and other assorted nonsense to witness.

Nominally, Brett Leonard’s Virtuosity wasn’t written by a drunken monkey, but looking at this assortment of plot holes so gigantic they are basically their own movie trilogy, ideas so stupid you’d be embarrassed to have come up with them, and a plot so plain idiotic I’m suddenly feeling rather good about myself, it’s probably best to pretend it actually was. Now, I love to go and on about the craziness of the Italian exploitation movie factories in the 70s and 80s, but Virtuosity is another proof that batshit crazy ideas were alive and well in mid-90s US mainstream action and (sort of) SF cinema, too.

In fact, Virtuosity’s sheer bizarre dumbness, the total insistence on having not a single scene or character that does make even a lick of sense during the whole course of this thing, would get it a proud place in the pantheon of Italian bullshit filmmaking. Only that comparable Italian productions would never have had the obvious nice and cosy budget this one cam throw at the screen, or been able to afford young Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, just on the cusp of biggest stardom.

Speaking of Washington, one of the best, and actually most insane, elements of the film is how much the man treats the whole mess of noise and nonsense surrounding him with utmost seriousness, apparently approaching this thing with the same sense of professionalism and style he’d use on a film with an actual script parsable by humans. There’s certainly no phoning in from Washington, which makes a delicious contrast to the total wackiness of his surroundings. Which nicely brings us to Crowe, also not phoning it in but actually chewing the scenery, the script and probably the air itself in a version of cartoonish evil murderous villainy that really would have suggested the man as a pretty great Joker for a Batman movie. It’s really a joy to watch these guys doing their very contrasting respective things, putting effort into every dumb thing the script throws at them.

They are assisted in this effort by a cast of a dozen or so character actors and cult film favourites like Lynch, William Forsythe, Louise Fletcher, William Fichtner, and so on and so forth, all of whom are of course game for any stupid shit.


So, despite being dumber than a rock, Virtuosity is just great fun to watch, its wacky and wrong ideas flying at you without pause, with a good handful of highly professionally and effectively realized action sequences adding even more joy to the affair. It’s always very clear the film did have a decent budget, too, so its misguided and improbable ideas about the near future, humanity, the way anything in real life works, and life itself, are realized in lovely sharp colours, shot with style and edited with verve. And of course, the contrast between the batshit craziness of it all and the slickness of its surface adds another layer of charm to Virtuosity, turning this into quite the experience.

Three Films Make A Post: Every THING needs to eat.

Seven Keys to Baldpate (1947): Lew Landers’s version of the Earl Derr Biggers (of Charlie Chan fame) novel is a pleasant little Old Dark House movie, zipping merrily along through its semi-comedic tale of a writer coming to a very special writing retreat for a bet and encountering all sorts of Old Dark House nonsense (though no gorilla, I sadly have to report). I’m pretty sure this one was already pretty lightweight 70 years ago, and if you expect hidden depths to the film you’ll probably be sorely disappointed. However, old pro Landers certainly knew how to pace a film, and even how to involve comic relief characters without it becoming annoying. He also bothered to put in enough atmospheric shots and suspenseful – if old-fashioned – little moments to make this a pleasant and fun experience to watch, even today.

2 Guns (2013): If you’d tell me there are two directors named Baltasar Kormákur working right now, the good one and the one making boring action comedies with Mark Wahlberg, I’d probably believe you. This one pairs Marky Mark with poor old Denzel Washington to go through the old buddy cop/whatever routine. The result isn’t pretty, with the leading couple lacking in chemistry, a script that seemingly tries to be the first comedy without any jokes, action scenes that are competently shot yet totally uninvolving, and a cast that seems about as invested in their characters as I found myself to be – not at all. Only Bill Paxton as evil CIA man and Edward James Olmos as Mexican Cartel boss put any kind of effort and charm in but our supposed leading men work far below their capabilities. It’s hard to blame them, for the whole affair feels less like a film anyone involved actually wanted to make than a low effort pay check for anyone involved.


The Debutantes (2017): This Filipino horror movie by Prime Cruz about a teenage outsider (Sue Ramirez) with strange powers finding herself first pulled into, than degraded by her school’s queen bees and the ensuing deadly consequences isn’t any more original than 2 Guns but it sure as hell is more involving. That’s thanks to some more than decent acting by the whole of the young cast, spirited direction and a script that actually has a point and knows how to get there. Following my usual love for the local in horror cinema, I am also rather happy to report that the supernatural explanation for the minor mayhem that ensues is not quite as close to the Carrie model as I had at first expected but uses a creature of Filipino myth and legend to express thematic concerns about loneliness and alienation. All of which isn’t bad at all for a teen horror film.

In short: Out of Time (2003)

This one’s a fun enough twisty little thriller directed by Carl Franklin with elements that look more noirish than they’ll turn out to be, its world view a bit too bound for a happy ending. The film is mostly concerned with showing how its hero - Denzel Washington as the chief of police of a tiny town in Florida – tries to juggle half a dozen problems (among them his cop soon to be ex-wife Eva Mendes and various streaks of very bad luck) to keep himself out of jail (or worse), after he has stolen drug money to pay for his girlfriend’s (who is also married to a wife-beating Dean Cain, no less) cancer treatment and finds himself betrayed. All that despite him not being exactly the brightest guy in the world.

Because the Chief is played by Denzel Washington, and his crimes are based on compassion and love (well, and lust, too, but you know) and not hurting anyone, our protagonist is not meant to be one of those thriller characters whose suffering the viewers are supposed to cheer on but rather meant for identification with his plight, an approach that makes sense but that rather divorces this from true neo noir status by being just too damn nice. As a thriller, the film suffers a bit from a script (by David Collard) that plays so fair with the audience it tends to telegraph all of its twists so clearly one might think it takes its audience to be even bigger idiots than its protagonist. There’s also a suspense scene that suggests that either Collard or his hero doesn’t know about the magic of find and replace, but I’m gonna let that slide, too.

Fortunately, the film has other things to recommend it. Once I got over the lack of neo noir goodness, I enjoyed Out of Time’s good-natured tone where not all friendship and love is based on betrayal and lies as a nice change from the more bitter and cynical stuff I usually watch when I indulge in thrillers.


Another plus is of course Denzel Washington. Even in a bad or mediocre movie, Washington is always at the very least fun to watch. Here, he works very well as the normal guy in far over his head, even though I never really bought him as quite as dumb as his character is supposed to be. There’s also a game supporting cast, and Carl Franklin’s direction that tends a bit towards the picture postcard slick but also does create a sense of (fake) place and goes through your usual suspense sequences with conviction, timing and friendly winks and nods towards the audience that do go well with the general tone of Out of Time.

In short: The Magnificent Seven (2016)

While Antoine Fuqua’s remake of John Sturges’s brilliant remake of Kurosawa’s awesome – in the old sense of the word – film is a perfectly entertaining big budget mainstream western kind of thing (a sentence I’m getting used to having opportunity to write again), it is also a bit of a mess.

Fuqua never seems to be able to decide what kind of film he is actually making: is it a fun action adventure? A film all about the exciting but unpleasant violence? A revisionist western that gives people who aren’t white (and if you squint, even those that aren’t male) their due? A film about what violence does to the men habitually committing it? A would-be Tarantino western? The script has perfectly fine scenes belonging to each of these concepts but it doesn’t even make much of an effort to tie them together into a satisfying whole, so the film is always lesser than the sum of its parts.

Apart from this main flaw, the filmmaking is another example of Antoine Fuqua’s position as a director without any visible personality whose movies look and feel as if they might have been directed by anyone technically competent, which is increasingly sad when a guy has directed movies since the early 90s and should have developed something of a style of his own by now. I’m also rather unhappy with the yellowish colour lying over everything here, a colour obsession I thought movies had finally gotten over again; for the Western genre, this is a particularly bad fit, particularly in a film full of shots of grass that’s supposed to be green (or so I've heard).

I’m also confused why the production went with a mostly utterly indifferent score by James Horner and Simon Franglen that only comes alive when it’s directly quoting Elmer Bernstein’s score for the Sturges film? Also about who thought Vincent D’Onofrio’s (who usually can’t do wrong with me) accent was a good idea, and last but not least why, when you go with a Tarantino style talkative neurotic main villain you then don’t take the extra step and give him decent dialogue (well, monologues, really) nor cast someone who is actually good at playing this sort of role?

All this does make The Magnificent Seven sound like a worse film than it actually is. It really is a watchable film, if in a very frustrating manner.

Two Men of Violence: A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014) & The Equalizer (2014)

I was all prepped up to file A Walk Among the Tombstones, a Lawrence Block adaptation by Scott Frank, under “another film where Liam Neeson plays an aging Man of Violence™ who has to get back to his old ways again”, in other words, as something that’ll probably be decently entertaining but also something that I’ve seen before a few times too often. And sure, A Walk does belong into this particular genre of crime films but this one feels special and weighty all the way through, with the clichés feeling close again to the truths that once built these clichés.

The superiority of Scott Frank’s film becomes particularly clear in comparison with the same year’s Denzel Washington version of The Equalizer directed by Antoine Fuqua. Whereas the Equalizer makes a lot of gestures towards the horrificness of violence and the toll it takes on those performing it (not much about the victims, nor about the fact the borders between the role of victim and perpetrator might get rather fluid sometimes, though), by the end, it’s basically fist-pumping Washington’s character (a guy who stops the time he needs to kill a bunch of people on his watch), spouting all the usual vigilante movie crap, and simply ignoring much of what it has set up, A Walk is all made out of one piece, not turning away from the violence yet also never simply condoning it. In fact, there’s nothing simple in this film’s moral world except perhaps simple human compassion. Again, compare the way the Equalizer uses the compassionate acts of its hero as a basis to then cheer on his acts of horrible violence, where A Walk treats both things as standing in opposition to each other even when some of Scudder’s violence really – perversely - is a product of that compassion. The difference is that A Walk heads for the grey moral zones this sort of thing causes with open eyes and a headful of thoughts where The Equalizer is shouting “FUCK YEAH!” way too loud to have time for thoughts, particular once the film has reached its second half, when all promising suggestions the people involved might actually have realized that McCall isn’t an awesome badass but both an awesome badass and a monster, and that there just might be a problem with that, fly out the window.

Of course, Antoine Fuqua’s unpleasantly showy direction doesn’t help The Equalizer’s case much either, always using the wrong kinds of gestures, and always in a way that suggests it doesn’t really want to think about the nature of its protagonist despite having brought it up during its first hour (of more than two, which also makes a simple plot unnecessarily bloated) itself. A Walk’s Scott Frank, on the other hand, has a clear, calm, and controlled approach to direction that looks much simpler than Fuqua’s but really brings out much more subtlety, eschewing to hammer ever point it makes home, and building up a sense of place and atmosphere.

Now, I wasn’t really planning to come down quite as hard on The Equalizer just after I watched it, because I had a decent – if not un-annoyed - time with it, it’s just that I saw A Walk Among the Tombstones right the next evening, and really couldn’t help but notice how much better Frank’s film is, and how much worse the Fuqua outing becomes in direct comparison, not so much for reasons of it being catastrophically bad, but because it is a barely decent film compared to one I expect to return to again and again, and its thoughtlessness truly becomes clear in the contrast.

What’s undeniably good in both films is the acting, and in this regard, I’d probably even argue The Equalizer to be slightly superior: for where Liam Neeson et al actually have interesting and not unsubtle characterisation and focused direction to work from, Denzel Washington, Chloe Grace Moretz and so on do their best to make something out of a film that just doesn’t seem to know what it actually thinks about its main character and that surely doesn’t want to face any unpleasant implications of the way he acts when it comes down to it, because fuck yeah, slowly walking away from an explosion. So where Neeson gives a performance that gains a part of its considerable strength and authority from the possibilities the work around and behind him provides it with, every bit of Washington’s success is one all of his own. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure all the coherence McCall has as a character belongs to Washington and the way he and Moretz play off of each other in their scenes, the bizarre tacked on happy ending notwithstanding.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,crime,action,scott frank,liam neeson,brian "astro" bradley,denzel washington,chloe grace moretz,antoine fuqua