Caught the new Equalizer 2 flick starring Denzel Washington over the weekend. This is a sequel to the pretty good first flick from a few years ago and to the 80s action/cop show (which I’ve never seen).
Equalizer 2 is a bad movie. It’s slow, tedious, repetitive, and dull. It’s kind of surprising that a big Hollywood flick could turn out a movie where so little happens and nobody apparently noticed. The first 45 minutes of the movie are spent following Washington’s Lyft driver (he retired from the Home Depot) as he drives around, listening to the problems of his passengers, and occasionally intervening. Because he’s a good guy badass who helps people… but only sometimes. Sometimes he goes to dinner with old friends, sometimes he stops by home and admires the garden or talks to the local at-risk teen. In general… he doesn’t do much and I spent my time wanting to know what any of this has to do with anything.
But 45 minutes in, we get a hint of a plot. One of his friends is murdered in Europe. Does he pack his bags and fly to Europe to solve the crime using his particular set of skills? Nah. He meanders about Boston investigating things from afar… more-or-less… and it takes another 30 minutes for the bad guys to notice and we get an action scene. Then we finally get into the plot… kind of. Because sometimes he hangs out in a subplot or two, trying to keep the local at-risk teen from joining a gang, for example.
Eventually we get to to some decent suspense scenes that risk becoming action scenes… but thankfully the film avoids that. Can’t have excitement get in the way of the doldrums. And when we finally do get the cliched showdown between our hero and the villains, it’s pretty tedious. It takes place during a hurricane (or a nor’easter) and you’d think that’d be a bit more exciting but I kept wondering how all that wind interferes with the trajectory of their bullets.
Also kept trying to remember how an old Mystery Science Theater 3000 line went…. I finally remembered: “It’s a chillingly uninteresting assault of mind numbing, gut wrenching, brain bloating non-action.” I was trying to remember that through the second hour of the film. Really kept running around in circles in my brain…. Not that I’m equating this movie with that line or anything.
I wish I could say “And Denzel saves the day” but he really doesn’t. Sure, Washington has a lot of charisma and is a good actor, but he brings stoic blankness to 90% of the film. His character is so confident and so bad-ass, that all the time we spend with him driving his Lyft and allegedly having character moments, we get nothing from him. You can’t have a character-driven movie if the character reveals nothing about himself. Other than he’s a quiet, observant alleged bad-ass.
This is a terrible, tedious slog of a movie. It has too many subplots that amount to nothing while we watch and wonder why any of this is happening. Hell, there’s an old Jewish man who lost his sister’s painting to the Nazis during WW2. This story is eventually resolved but not by Denzel’s character. Why was this in the movie? Why was any of this in the movie? Who knows? Stay away, don’t try to figure it out yourself. Watch the first movie. Watch the original 80s show. Hell, watch Airwolf.
Score: 59