Somewhere, there's a graveyard for misguided and never-should-have-been-attempted film adaptations of beloved television shows, and whoa, boy, does it smell extra-ripe.
For every success — The Addams Family, The Fugitive, Mission: Impossible — there are dozens of failures, and most of them expected. I doubt many people thought a feature-length adventure based on Baywatch, CHIPS or The Dukes of Hazzard had any chance in hell of being good.
And, while we may argue about what constitutes a success — I happened to enjoy The A-Team and Dragnet — it’s fair to say that sometimes an adaptation sneaks up to genuinely surprise us.
Such was the case in 2014 with The Equalizer, which repackaged the former small-screen neighborhood vigilante procedural, which aired on CBS from 1985 to 1989, as a starring vehicle for Denzel Washington.
Reteamed with Antoine Fuqua, the director who helped him nab the Oscar for best actor in 2001 for Training Day, Washington came off as a major bad-ass, single-handedly taking down a Russian mob syndicate after they messed with the wrong prostitute.
Four years later, however, the stench from that aforementioned graveyard hangs thick in the air.
The Equalizer 2 is a textbook example of why sequels should be required to have some measure of critical, independent analysis prior to production commencing. The central story is inexplicably diluted by numerous subplots. Most of the bad guys don’t even have names. And Washington looks bored as hell, which is understandable, given he already made this movie, and better, the first time around.
The opening sequence, inside a train rumbling along outside of Istanbul in Turkey, actually bodes well and delivers some close-quarters, hand-to-hand brutality.
What I noticed, however, is that Washington’s Robert McCall, the former special-ops military soldier long presumed dead, is reading Between the World and Me, a 2015 book by Ta-Nehisi Coates that was written in the form of a letter to a child, discussing what it means to be black in today’s United States.
Back in 2014, McCall was reading Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea when he first encountered the young prostitute who would prompt his return to action. The plot of that book actually dovetailed nicely with the story unfolding onscreen.
Fuqua and his returning screenwriter, Richard Wenk, clearly hoped that Coates’ book would continue in that tradition. And, to be fair, a large chunk of The Equalizer 2 involves McCall trying to be a good shepherd to the various African-American and immigrant residents who live around his neighborhood in Boston. In particular, he takes a young black student named Miles (Ashton Sanders) under his wing, hoping to validate Miles’s aspirations of becoming an artist. But Miles is in deep with a local gang after his older brother was gunned down by some inner-city rivals.
In one of the film’s most frustrating sequences, McCall tracks Miles down to a tenement building essentially being held hostage by the gang-bangers. He renders several gang guys unconscious, takes their weapons and bursts into a packed apartment where a bunch of drugs are being cooked, a submachine gun in one hand and a pistol in the other. Miles is seated just inside, surrounded by armed bangers.
“Who’s this [racial epithet]?” one guy asks.
“I’m your father,” McCall snaps back, one of the film’s few good lines. “Your momma just didn’t tell you.”
McCall demands that Miles leave the apartment with him. Inexplicably, none of the dozen-plus gang members follow, guns blazing. Then, just outside the apartment door, McCall berates Miles, telling him he doesn’t know what dead is. He puts a gun in Miles’ hand and presses the barrel to his own forehead, imploring Miles to shoot him. Then they leave. In the very next scene, Miles is at McCall’s apartment, asking to share some soup.
I get what the filmmakers hoped to achieve with this scene. I understand the message they wanted to convey, the tough love mixed with hope that McCall is trying to use to get through to Miles. But it simply doesn’t make sense. That’s not how the real world operates. That's not how the world of The Equalizer operates. McCall would have either being killed by the gang, or he would have killed the entire gang in a bloody gun battle.
Thematically, such scenes serve only to derail any narrative momentum that The Equalizer 2 is able to generate. And there are a lot of moments like this in the film.
McCall, who worked at The Home Depot in the first movie, now makes a living as a Lyft driver. At one point, he gets a call to pick up a young female escort from a swanky high-rise. The girl has clearly been roughed over. McCall goes upstairs to the apartment where six white guys in expensive suits are busy doing lines of cocaine, ecstatic about having gang-raped the escort. McCall lays them all out in about 20 seconds and then demands a five-star Lyft review from the one guy still breathing and conscious.
In several other scenes, McCall ferries around an elderly passenger who is trying to locate a rare painting of a long-lost loved one. I actually wrote in my notes, This thing is going to end with him finding the painting. No spoilers, but I wasn’t far off.
In addition to Miles, McCall also helps a Muslim woman whose neighborhood garden is destroyed by young thugs.
None of this, by the way, has anything to do with the actual plot, which focuses on McCall’s longtime government friend (Melissa Leo) and her husband (Bill Pullman). Leo’s character is brutally killed in Brussels, Belgium while investigating the death of a deep operative. McCall agrees to hunt down the killers, which leads him to reconnect with several members of his former black ops unit, including Dave York (Pedro Pascal), his longtime partner who attended his funeral years before.
At about that point, I wrote in my notes: Is his former partner in on it???
I will pay you a penny if you can guess whether I was right or not in my assumption.
There’s also an extended subplot involving McCall’s dead wife, his wedding band and their former home on a barrier island somewhere outside of Boston. Fuqua and Wenk seem at times to be more interested in focusing on the contrast between McCall’s skills as a mercenary and his increasing age and self-imposed isolation, a la Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, but those efforts are annoyingly disjointed.
On top of everything else, Fuqua repeatedly focuses on news reports in the background during several scenes, which keep mentioning a hurricane that’s bearing down on the East Coast.
The hurricane eventually arrives, just in time to serve as a rain-soaked backdrop for the underwhelming finale. Put it this way: More than a dozen audience members left a free screening of The Equalizer 2 during the climatic firefight between McCall and four bad guys, which is rendered barely watchable due to the unnecessary storm conditions.
The Equalizer 2 itself is wholly unnecessary, offensively derivative and lethally dull.
Washington is a great actor, and Fuqua has shown flashes of brilliance throughout his career, but they’ve done their fans a great disservice this time by returning to a dry well with no idea how to conjure water.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at bloodviolenceandbabes.com, on Facebook or on Twitter.
