![]() ![]() The story skips from Turkey to Boston and elsewhere as McCall smoothly juggles crises, regularly pausing to break someone’s bones. (A believer in tough love, McCall gives him a stern talking-to delivered at gunpoint and a copy of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book “ Between the World and Me.”) There’s also Sam (Orson Bean), a shameless cliché in need of rescue and a rewrite, and Susan (an effective Melissa Leo), McCall’s only friend and a retired Central Intelligence Agency officer who still takes care of classified business. Mostly, it has McCall and the characters who rotate around his divine radiance, notably Miles, who’s in need of a drastic course correction. Washington’s earlier sanguineous vehicles), “The Equalizer 2” has a whole lot going on. Written by Richard Wenk (his name can be found on some of Mr. He draws from his stash now and again when he’s not quietly reading in his monastic apartment or driving for Lyft, picking up souls who, with one unruly exception, he benevolently observes in the rearview mirror. Fuqua has a serious ocular thing going on in this movie - and a secret arsenal. ![]() He watches over the building with a sharp eye - Mr. To his neighbors, McCall surely seems a good neighbor: reserved, helpful, friendly without being pushy. Sanders plays Miles, a student and would-be artist who’s started to stray and who lives in the same homey Boston apartment complex as Mr. That role here is played with glimmers of feeling by Ashton Sanders, the memorably delicate teenage protagonist of “Moonlight.” In each film, the hero roughly takes a younger, less-hardened man under his wing, giving the audience a surrogate, someone to cling to when things or the avenger get too weird or uncomfortably rough. However much separates these two movies - story, craft, technique, production context, the larger world, you name it - they both hinge on a familiar American defender-savior: the resolute, physically imposing, quite possibly deranged solitary older man who sets wrongs right. He has played his share of decent, morally assured and even bland characters, but, like so many of the greatest American male stars, violence becomes him. Washington has played characters who righteously or just summarily deliver death to the deserving: “The Magnificent Seven,” “The Book of Eli,” “Man on Fire” and so on. It’s forgivable if you don’t remember anything about the original (I didn’t), which blurs with all the other movies in which Mr. We’re clearly not meant to worry about the niceties - legal, ethical, narrative - while watching “The Equalizer 2.” We are meant to watch, and to cheer. Although the holy spirit of Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch hovers over many cinematic courtrooms, movies have often seemed more satisfying when they forget order and the law and serve up justice as cold (and blood-red) as possible. For decades, the TV producer Dick Wolf, the diabolical genius behind the “ Law & Order” franchise, has profited from the reassuring spectacle of professionals balancing (usually) the scales of justice. The violently avenging hero is a durable American archetype, and denying it - and the indefensible, irresistible pleasures of watching primitive justice in action - is probably pointless at this stage in our history. ![]() He’s especially persuasive playing the kind of brutal redeemers who unblinkingly snuff out the murderous many to save a single innocent, which is exactly what he does at the start of “The Equalizer 2.” Washington has been meting out extreme punishment for some time. One of the reigning symbolic patriarchs of genre cinema - a fraternity that includes Clint Eastwood, Liam Neeson and the rather less-convincing Bruce Willis - Mr. Vengeance is mine, saith the lord, but that was before Denzel Washington stepped up. ![]()
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