The Equalizer 2

[4.0 stars] [IMDb Link]

[Amazon Link]
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Denzel Washington is Getting Up There (his birthday, as I type, is tomorrow, December 28, and he will be 64 years young.) He remains a believable action star, however. Here he reprises his role as Robert McCall, the Equalizer. His job is to bring his brand of vigilante justice to the people for whom the normal channels are unavailable or inefficacious. This often requires prodigious amounts of spectacular violence, at which McCall excels.

McCall lives modestly in a working-class Boston apartment, but he's well-off enough to jaunt off to Europe to retrieve a kidnapped child from (what I'm pretty sure is) the Orient Express. Mostly he sticks to home: comforting a Holocaust survivor (Orson Bean, not dead yet!) or mentoring a black kid wavering between thug life and nurturing his artistic talent.

But the main plot is driven by international intrigue: a CIA "resource" and his wife have been gruesomely murdered, the scene set up to look like a murder/suicide. This brings in McCall's old CIA boss, Susan (Melissa Leo) to check things out. Which (eventually) brings in McCall, too. The bad guys handle "loose ends" in the classic bad guy way.

A thrilling conclusion is set in Marshfield MA, seaside during a nor'easter/hurricane. And that's neat too.


Last Modified 2024-01-24 11:52 AM EDT