When poor Susan is killed on the job in Brussels, McCall begins to suspect that something fishy is going on in his old workplace. He also spends his free time kicking seven shades out of criminals. But when McCall meets Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz), a young girl under the control of ultra-violent Russian gangsters, he can’t stand idly by he has to help her. His only friend in the world is a former colleague named Susan (Melissa Leo). In The Equalizer, Denzel Washington plays McCall, a man who believes he has put his mysterious past behind him and dedicated himself to beginning a new, quiet life. How else do you explain the fact that EQ2 spends its first third reintroducing us to Robert McCall, and his very particular set of skills (he can beat up a room full of bad guys in 30 seconds)?īasically, our man with no plan is a cab driver. And for some reason, The Equalizer 2 (also directed by Fuqua) seems to have forgotten that The Equalizer 1 exists. But The Equalizer 2 is a different sort of beast, altogether.įor a start, there is an entire miniseries worth of material going on in this thing. This was Washington’s Taken and Die Hard, all rolled up into one ridiculous, yet reasonably watchable, actioner. Released in 2014, The Equalizer - a loose cover version of the 1980s TV show - presented Washington as Robert McCall, a former marine and Defense Intelligence Agency operative, who refuses to turn a blind eye to crime.

The only problem, of course, is that I don’t recall anyone asking for a follow-up to director Antoine Fuqua’s hyper-violent and hyper-silly vigilante thriller. Here’s a fun fact: The Equalizer 2 marks the first time that Denzel Washington has made a sequel to one of his films.

Movie the equalizer