![]() ![]() It’s the most basic motivation they could have, and yet the film waits far too long to reveal what every single person in the audience has assumed from the start: Dave York, Robert’s old CIA partner, is pure evil. Minor spoiler alert for a first act twist that’s revealed in the trailer: When Robert’s CIA contact (a shockingly low-key Melissa Leo) is murdered, the bad guys set about cleaning up any and all loose ends. It doesn’t help that the antagonists are a bland and spectacularly obvious lot of killers who do nothing to challenge Robert’s concept of justice. Wenk wants us to think of Robert as an avenging angel with demons in his (secret) closet, but he’s just an imperious blue-collar superhero, and there’s precious little pleasure in watching this guy put the world to rights. “You don’t know what death is!” Robert screams at Miles, even though the first thing we learn about Miles is that his brother was just gunned down in the streets. The movie doesn’t even pick up on the moments when its protagonist oversteps, when his indignation grows so loud that he becomes deaf to how dumb he sounds. He’s just about self-actualized, and profoundly boring as a result. He never questions his choices, and Richard Wenk’s scattershot screenplay never asks him to. Robert is pretty much Gotham’s reckoning, and he’s far past the point of no return. Every sin he encounters only makes him stronger every challenge he meets only makes him cooler. Some people need to be straightened out with a bullet, others just need a copy of “Between the World and Me.” Robert is happy to help them both. He’s judge, jury, and executioner - he’s everybody’s keeper. He’s the Platonic ideal of a Denzel Washington character: A bad-ass who possesses a biblical swagger, a sage who isn’t afraid to bully you into becoming a better person. In short, Robert delivers some old-fashioned righteousness to a city that seems to have outgrown it. Sensitive but on the brink of surrender, Sanders gives by far the film’s best performance - Miles is the only believable human being around. He keeps a mindful eye on Miles (“Moonlight” breakout Ashton Sanders), a bright teen in his apartment complex who’s vulnerable to gang activity in the area. He shuttles a traumatized intern to the hospital, and then makes sure the douche bros who abused her pay for their crimes (and give him a five-star rating for the extra service). He takes an old man to the store every week. The sequel finds that Robert has kept himself busy, using Lyft to exact some measure of local justice. The first installment followed Robert’s transformation into Boston’s very own Batman - lost in the wake of his wife’s death, and haunted by the black ops missions from his past, he found new purpose in righting the wrongs that other people wouldn’t. ![]() It’s a clunky and uninspired bit of violence in a movie that’s full of clunky and uninspired bits of violence, but the beatdown is enough to remind us that Robert doesn’t just kick someone’s ass, he glares at them the whole time with a glint of moral fury the people he equalizes die knowing they deserved it.Īnyway, none of that really matters, as most of the action in “The Equalizer 2” hits our hero a bit closer to home. ![]() It’s unclear what the costume is supposed to accomplish (“oh shit, the Lyft driver who took us to Logan Airport is here: Kill him!!”), but Robert obviously equalizes the hell out of the bad guys. Retired CIA operative (and current Lyft driver) Robert McCall, disguised as a Muslim beneath a kufi and a very fake beard, follows some human traffickers into the bar car. This dull and unfocused sequel begins in the middle of the night aboard a sleeper train as it slings across rural Turkey. The bad news is that the rest of us are, too.Įven though “ The Equalizer 2” essentially picks up where the previous film left off, that doesn’t make its opening sequence any less bizarre. The good news is that the fans of Antoine Fuqua’s “The Equalizer” - a bland and pulpy 2014 riff on the ’80s TV series of the same name - are in for more of the same. Why not “The Manchurian Candidate 2″? It’s more relevant than ever! Why not “The Taking of Pelham 456,” or “The Greater Debaters”? “3 Guns”? “He Still Got Game”? “Déjà Vu All Over Again”!? Literally anything else. Why not “John Q 2″? It’s not as if we ever figured out that whole “healthcare” thing. Where to Watch This Week’s New Movies, from ‘The Last Voyage of the Demeter’ to ‘Love Life’
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