The Equalizer 2 – The film starts on FILMSTARTS.de

We do not really know when we look " The Equalizer 2 " why Denzel Washington, for the first time in his 40-year career, made his debut in one of his box office successes. After all, the sequel has nothing really new to add to the predecessor of 2014, which in turn is loosely based on the 80s TV series "The Equalizer". Perhaps it was simply because Washington wanted to work with his favorite director, Antoine Fuqua, for the fourth time ("Training Day", "The Glorious Seven"). However, "The Equalizer 2" is a film for fans of the double Oscar and the dry action of the rhythm more difficult, while the rest of the audience is more likely to be bothered by the winding scenario and the underrated intrigues.

Robert McCall (Denzel Washington), who used to kill people on behalf of the government, now serves his community as a Lyft driver. So he was heating a survivor living in a retirement home every day for too low a rate in the area or was dealing with the removal of graffiti, the houses were corrupt – and if a woman boarded, who was Obviously recently been raped, so just he makes sure the executioners who feel safe in their penthouse suite do not go unpunished. Robert McCall is the good soul of the neighborhood – and he does it with all the strength he needs.

At the same time, McCall's ex-chief, Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo) investigates in the case of an American officer who allegedly shot at his wife and then at himself. Just as the evidence increases that things might have gone quite differently, Susan is brutally murdered in her hotel room – and so McCall is brought back into her old life as a state killer, because the killing his best and only remaining friend he can not take it like that …

Robert McCall is someone who does not argue but cleans. Someone, that most of the populists of the regulars table would cheerily encourage in his bloody clean raids, but at the same time act in a thoughtful way and reading "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust. With the remake of the clbadic "Death Wish" that turns out to be a punk, McCall is definitely a potentially more exciting and ambivalent figure than Bruce Willis' bored and watchful surgeon. Nevertheless, the self-righteous section of "The Equalizer 2" ignites too rarely – and this is mainly due to the almost sterile cleanliness with which the individual cleaning miniatures are presented.

McCall cares for a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and the vegetable garden of his Muslim neighbor. He does not let a young black man (Ashton Sanders) fall on the clutches of local gangs and brings back the kidnapped daughter of his bookseller from Turkey to the United States. All this sounds far too controlled to really provoke – and it rarely goes so far that it's at least a pleasure Guilty Pleasure politically incorrect: So really unleashed self-justification Safari, like McCall a group of spoiled, wealthy kids in business, who can not even remember the name of their rape victim, the new trainee of the company Papi.

In the first part were the special abilities of McCall, who runs through every imaginable process in his head before a fight and also uses all sorts of everyday objects in the room to kill his opponents – most of the time in number -, one of the main attractions. In "The Equalizer 2", this element is not only used much more sparingly, but also less visually – many viewers who have not seen "The Equalizer" should ask at the end of the film, what McCall with his digital stopwatch on his wrist.

Instead, the new culmination of the action is with some distance the thunderous finale, which takes place in a newly evacuated coastal town, where now only McCall, his opponents and a huge hurricane are venting . After having begun with a great mystery about the supposed suicide of the American agent and the alleged theft of Susan Plummer, all the open questions finally resolve in one scene. In this, the little nasty surprise in one of the wonderfully inappropriate situation can say some smart, ambivalent stuff, only to mutate in a minute but still to the naughty exchangeable Bond 08/15. It is very likely that "The Equalizer 2" would have been a better movie if you had chosen one of the two stories told here, or at least more coherent with each other.

Conclusion: A bad stereotype Selbstjustiz-Reißer and a surprising little agent-action-movie slow down here, also because there is almost no point of contact between the two strands – and in the end you end up with an unnecessarily long duration of two hours. Thus, "The Equalizer 2", once superhuman, is mainly inspired by the unparalleled charisma of Denzel Washington and the ideal setting for the stormy finale.