The Fourth Annual James Proclaims Advent Calendar of Christmas(ish) Films – Door 21

2014’s The Equalizer is a fairly ‘by-the-book’ action flic, that is elevated by having a decent cast, headed by Denzil Washington, and a director in Antoine Fuqua who knows his way around a generic action movie. But while it more than adequately passes the time for those of us who enjoy occasionally turning off our brains for a couple of hours, it probably didn’t merit a sequel.

But it made money at the box office, so a sequel was perhaps inevitable. The Equalizer 2 is about as inspired as its imaginative title. It’s nonetheless safe to say that Fuqua and Washington are still good at their respective jobs and while it feels like both are maybe phoning this in a bit, if you liked the first movie, you’ll probably like this.

Given that the sequel made quite a bit of money in its own right, the world can probably expect The Equalizer 3 at some point in the future. And if it does get made I’ll probably watch it.

But I won’t lose any sleep if it doesn’t.

Score for Christmasishness

While it is never explicitly mentioned in the movie, it does appear to be Christmas for a few scenes quite early in the movie. Notably a hotel (in which some violent vigilante justice is delivered by our hero) appears to be decorated very festively. Whether this was an actual choice on the part of the director, or whether it just so happened to be Christmas in real life when those scenes were filmed is anyone’s guess, but I’d assume it was the latter and no-one really thought it was an important enough detail to edit or reshoot those scenes. But after four years of writing these pointless Christmas movie reviews, I’m finely attuned to such details and whether it wants to be included or not, The Equalizer 2 is officially part of my Christmas(ish) film collection.