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It’s as though Fuqua and Wenk resolved to combine the most uninteresting parts from several episodes of the original 1980s television series into a single film, leaving the result to feel sluggish. Add to this Wenk’s penchant for unnecessary subplots, and the viewer spends much of the film’s length waiting for something meaningful to happen. become tiresome and banal given their frequency (in part due to the globe-trotting script). The sheer volume of B-roll footage throughout The Equalizer 2-much of it shot by cinematographer Oliver Wood using drone photography-is astounding, and exteriors of eventual locations in Belgium and Washington D.C. The first minutes involve protracted establishing shots of the Boston skyline and landmarks, as well as throwaway moments of McCall driving random Lyft passengers to their destinations. But the substance of The Equalizer 2, nonsensically dubbed “ EQ2” on promotional material, remains thin, and the film’s plodding tempo makes its two-hour runtime feel much, much longer. Wenk explores several extraneous subplots involving McCall’s passengers and other ponderous scenes of the hero quietly reflecting, suggesting Fuqua thinks he’s making an existentialist crime saga on par with the works of Jean-Pierre Melville or Michael Mann. The screenplay by Richard Wenk takes its time reestablishing McCall, an obsessive-compulsive lone wolf who has since given up his job at “Home Mart” to drive for Lyft. In what is perhaps an overcorrection of the original’s excessive bloodshed, Fuqua delivers a much slower, leisurely paced sequel that tests the viewer’s patience and remains light on killing (compared to the original, anyway). The sequel, The Equalizer 2, cuts down on the absurd violence of the first film, which found McCall using power tools on Russian gangsters in ridiculously gory action scenes. And, of course, in The Equalizer(2014), Denzel Washington plays Robert McCall, an ex-special-ops-turned-badass-Good-Samaritan whose gimmicks involve helping those in his Boston neighborhood, dispensing with baddies in the most gratuitously violent ways possible, and timing his elaborate beatings on his wristwatch for some inexplicable reason. Fuqua’s remake The Magnificent Seven(2016) pitted seven roguish heroes against a small army of bandits. Olympus Has Fallen (2011) featured a former Secret Service agent single-handedly saving the President of the United States from a siege on the White House. In Shooter (2007), Mark Wahlberg played an exiled sniper who embarks on a solitary mission to take down conspirators in a presidential assassination plot. Let’s review: Back in 2000, he made Bait, featuring Jamie Foxx as a hustler who outwits both the feds and the criminal underworld. Antoine Fuqua often makes movies about dangerous, highly-trained loners facing down a corrupt institution or an unbeatable cadre of bad guys in no-win scenarios.