Review: The Equalizer 2

Image courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

It's always a pleasure to watch Denzel Washington, but even he can't quite save "The Equalizer 2," a silly action thriller sequel that lags during the first section, which pays some sort of strange homage to "Kung Fu," but is nearly redeemed by an intense final confrontation during the film's final third.

Washington returns as Robert McCall in the sequel to Antoine Fuqua's first - and better - film, which was in turn based on the 1980s TV show of the same name. McCall, as we learned during the first go-round, is some type of former special ops guy who now lives out his days helping others in need and killing bad guys in graphically violent fashion.

As the film opens, Washington - wearing a not particularly convincing beard - is aboard a train in Turkey in an attempt to save a kidnapped girl. Later, he pays a visit to a bunch of one percenters who seemingly drugged and sexually assaulted a girl, who catches a ride in McCall's car - oh right, I forgot to mention that he's also a Lyft driver. During a later scene, he rescues a teenager named Miles (Ashton Sanders of "Moonlight") who has fallen in with some gun toting gang members and ends up paying him to paint a mural on his building.

In other words, McCall has his hands full. There's an actual scene here during which he's searching files on his computer to help crack a case involving the murder of one of his friends (Melissa Leo) when he looks up, sees Miles missing from his spot painting the mural, roams over to the gang members' hangout and pulls out a can of whoop ass. There's also an elderly Holocaust survivor whom McCall visits. Talk about multitasking.

Essentially, there's way too much going on in "The Equalizer 2" and most of these various threads - several of which seem to exist to pad out the movie, which would only be about an hour if it focused on the main story - get in the way of the other ones. The film's first half is often silly as McCall goes around solving everyone's problems as if he were Kwai Chang Caine from the TV show "Kung Fu." It's not until the film's second half that the picture picks up.

Yes, the movie ends up revolving around a fairly typical action movie storyline: McCall finds out that some former comrades in arms have turned out to be major assholes, and may have been involved in Leo's character's death as well as the vicious slaying of a French family - whose death, oddly enough, is never explained to give the story any context - and he realizes that he'll have to go up against them. This all culminates in a very well executed and fairly intense series of face-offs during a hurricane in an abandoned town somewhere in a coastal town in Massachusetts. Say what you will about the film's narrative, but Fuqua does a mighty good job of staging an extended, chaotic action sequence with panache.

Unfortunately, the film reverts back to some of its earlier storylines and the finale includes a reunion that in any other film would have been moving, but comes off as ludicrous here because, well, that McCall can do it all. In terms of your typical summer sequel, you could do much worse than "The Equalizer 2," but Washington - a great actor - could do much better with material more compelling than what he's working with here.