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: 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.

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