Film Reviews & Movie Analysis

When things are out of balance, there’s only one aptly nicknamed person who can set them right again.

Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) is enjoying his retirement. Presumed dead by his former agency he has time to slow down; catch up on his reading, mentor a young wayward soul and meet interesting people as a Lyft driver.

However just because one is retired doesn’t mean their skills need to be, and McCall exercises his… unique talents whilst aiding unknowing civilians.

McCall is happy silently helping strangers in need, until his only friend is murdered.

This time when he steps out of the shadows – it’s personal.

I didn’t walk into this movie expecting much more than an average action movie, and even though I didn’t much care for The Equalizer, the trailer for The Equalizer 2 snared me.

There is something I enjoy about Denzel Washington’s stoic faced, OCD vigilante character. These traits give a level of precision to his fight scenes that my own personal super organised self can’t help but gravitate towards.

A nice B story was McCall’s mentoring of Miles (Ashton Sanders), a young kid with a talent for art who is balancing on the fence between a bright future and a life of crime.

My favourite aspect of the movie took place within the first third/half. This was when McCall was going about helping strangers in need, and listening to the strangers he drove around. There was a chaotic peace in it that ebbed and flowed really nicely.

From the minimal I said about the good, you can probably guess there’s going to be a lot of bad. Long story short: I really didn’t like this movie.

Well at first I did. It started really well with McCall on a train enroute to Istanbul exacting a deserved beat down. Even though the pace slowed after that, I was happy with him being a gun wielding good Samaritan.

My issue was that the above went on, like I said for half the movie, without much progression or anticipation – then bam – suddenly focus shifted to be about finding who was responsible for his friends death.

Why pull so much attention towards one storyline only to have the movie be about a completely different story altogether? From that halfway point movie went conventionally back to the beginning just when the action was meant to be rising. Once again we watched as events built, came together and eventually climaxed.

Because of this – and the general slow pace of the movie, even though it had a running time of 121 minutes, I honestly thought I was sat in the cinema for two and a half hours.

Personally, from the two stories played out, I preferred the one at the beginning. It was less troped than the latter – vengeance over a killed loved one. That being said, I still would have been satisfied if the film had done a better job of bridging the two arcs.

But none of those things happened, and all I have to say is that I won’t be sucked in again should they decided to make The Equalizer a trilogy.