He interacts with small children in a few scenes, and Washington takes delight in both those silly comic moments, and the dangerously comic one.īut if you can’t figure out who the bad guys are on first sight - hint, it’s NOT the 90 year old comic and game show veteran Orson Bean - you aren’t getting out enough. He’s plowing through “100 Books You Have to Read Before You Die,” and is up to Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” And there’s a bit of rough justice handed out to high-finance frat brothers who mistreat a hooker.īut more effort is put into McCall’s solitary life, the traits that give his character color. And that world sucks him back in to right a wrong, avenge a murder and give this downcast widower purpose.Īntoine Fuqua, Washington’s go-to action director, stages three top drawer shoot-outs/fights, one of them taking place in harrowing Lyft Ride from Hell. Stay off those corners!”Īnd there’s the former CIA boss (Oscar winner Melissa Leo) who still hooks McCall up with intel about this or that person of interest in his various do-gooding cases.Ī piece of his past, “another life,” the one his faked death allowed him out of, is revealed. Miles, who could go either way, the straight life or street corners selling drugs for gangs, is due a little “Fences” tough-love, some paid painting work by McCall to save him from bad influences. The neighborhood hoodie-wearing teen, Miles ( Ashton Sanders of “Moonlight”), is an unmotivated art student who acts awfully guilty at the gang graffiti covering the Muslim neighbor lady’s mural, the one on the wall overlooking her now-trashed vegetable garden. “I’ll be right here to pick you up when you get back.” There’s the GI headed for his flight to Afghanistan, worried about his first deployment, whom McCall reassures during the ride. And the pain that alters.ĭriving for Lyft in Boston, he sweetly undercharges the aged Holocaust survivor ( Orson Bean, 90 years young and sharp) to the photocopy shop where he organizes more “evidence” for his endless case against those who stole a family portrait during World War II. And that’s when the pain that hurts is administered. He’s giving the dude a choice, as he gives “everybody one last chance to do the right thing.” They never do. He warns his quarry, accompanied by armed henchmen, of the “two kinds of pain in the world the pain that hurts, and the pain that alters.” We meet McCall this time on a Turkish train disguised as a Muslim pilgrim, but really there to confront a Middle Eastern hood who kidnapped his daughter from her American mother. Denzel Washington may be in the Liam Neeson “man with particular skills” stage of his leading man carer, older, not so much “getting the girl” anymore as “getting his man.īut charisma and old-fashioned talent, what we glibly file under the label “chemistry” when actors click with every single co-star they share a movie with, carry him through in “The Equalizer 2,” a dawdling thriller that sacrifices thrills, surprises and at times coherence for the sake of character.Īs Robert McCall, retired CIA agent and violent, all-knowing vigilante, Washington walks with his usual unhurried purpose, speaks with the sad wisdom of experience or righteous fury of the aggrieved and fixes one and all with a sizing-you-up stare that has been his trademark.
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