The Equalizer 2 2018 * * * Stars

Director: Antoine Fuqua
Year: 2018
Rated R
Rating: * * * Stars
Cast: Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Melissa Leo

Released about four years after 2014's The Equalizer, The Equalizer 2 is at least 10-12 minutes shorter in length. You can plainly tell. "2" also feels readily like an outlying sequel and at the same, has almost no connection to the first film. Don't worry though. "2" plants Denzel Washington as its reliable, one man army ringer. He's probably my favorite actor and might be the coolest, most badass dude that ever lived. "I'm gonna kill each and every one of you and the only disappointment is that I only get to do it once." Ah Denzel, you slay me as Robert McCall bro. You are a beast!

Produced by Washington himself and being the fourth collaboration between him and director Antoine Fuqua, The Equalizer 2 again pits Denzel as a 60-plus-year-old, anti-hero juggernaut (Liam and Mel rank a close second). As a film, "2" initially comes off as slightly diluted, slightly globetrotting, and mostly slow-burning. Then at the hour and fifteen minute mark, Fuqua puts the pieces together making The Equalizer 2 a climatic and suspenseful revelation (check out "2's" cutthroat, final twenty minutes in the midst of a hurricane). Antoine has always been the slickest and most darkest of action firework helmers. His style of a modern day Western here coupled with remorseless soldiering is all the better for it.

Now in the first Equalizer, Denzel's McCall mysteriously works at a hardware store while trying to avenge the mistreatment of a teenager brutally owned by Russian mobsters. In The Equalizer 2, McCall mysteriously works as a Lyft driver while trying to avenge the death of his best friend and colleague, Mrs. Susan Plummer (played by the chameleon-like Melissa Leo). In hindsight, "2" is not as brutally violent or candidly exhausting as the original. However, the flick at times seems more ominous, more lustrous, and truly more revealing. With folded tea bag, hot water, iron fist, and glaring eye at his disposition, Washington's character is again the Jason Voorhees of savage dispatchers. He's gliding, stealth, and surgical in his bone-cracking gambits. The galvanizing Equalizer 2 succeeds because of him and even succeeds a little bit on its own. My rating: 3 stars.

Written by Jesse Burleson