The Equalizer 2

Antoine Fuqua’s 2018 film is the first sequel Denzel Washington has starred in. He explained it himself: he had been asked only about Safe House, pointless because his character had died, and about Inside Man; this one fit. It is Fuqua’s fourth film with Washington. The structure makes you wait. It opens on a train in Istanbul, passes through Brussels and settles in Boston, but the weight goes to McCall’s daily life: he drives for Lyft, looks after his young neighbour Miles, and carries an elderly Holocaust survivor still hunting a painting of his sister taken by the Nazis. The main line advances between those side stories, which is why it can feel scattered. The finale plays out in a coastal town under a hurricane. Fuqua says the storm was built as a metaphor: the hardest journey a man makes is the journey home. Those scenes were shot on the Massachusetts shore at Brant Rock in Marshfield and on Duxbury’s Powder Point Bridge, where the crew parked a fake boat to make the storm look meaner. It passed 190 million dollars worldwide. A good fit if you can wait through the neighbourhood material before the plot engages. Not for viewers who read those side stories as padding or dislike killings shown in close up.