Antoine Fuqua
A troubled police detective demoted to 911 operator duty scrambles to save a distressed caller.
The Equalizer 2 takes the raw entertainment value of the original film, inverts it into something unflinchingly brutal, removes the quirks of its main character, and builds to an anticlimactic final battle.
In The Equalizer 2, Robert McCall serves an unflinching justice for the exploited and oppressed, but how far will he go when that is someone he loves?
Westerns are the one genre I’ve never really gotten along with. I’ll watch a good one, and I have watched a number of classics, but it’s a genre that’s never particularly resonated with me. My father is a big fan of them, as are some good friends of mine, so this summer I made the decision to just try hard to find something I liked (other than Rio Bravo).
Hollywood seems to be stuck in an age of remakes and sequels. Though original films do exist, they are never as popular or successful as the large-scale blockbusters, which are the only sure moneymakers for studios. Coming from this standpoint, it’s no surprise that Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven exists.
I have a sneaking suspicion that every actor wants to be in a western, but box office results prove that audiences don’t want to see all those westerns. Sure, slinging on a holster and leaning against a fence looks cool, as one of the promotional photos for The Magnificent Seven proves, but without some sort of twist, people are not buying tickets. True Grit (2010) and Django Unchained are perhaps the only pure westerns to crack $100 million at the U.
Before it had even stepped into the ring, Southpaw was dead on arrival. After all, although boxing isn’t the sport that has generated the most movies, it is the sport that has generated the most beloved cinematic classics – from Rocky and Raging Bull to the more recent likes of Million Dollar Baby and The Fighter. At the screening I attended, I was far more likely to greet it as an unwelcome entry to the boxing movie pantheon, due to the fact that the last trailer before the movie started was for Creed, the new Rocky spin-off that benefits from having Sylvester Stallone yet again reprising his most iconic role.
The occupation of boxer is not ideal for most people. We respect them as gladiators of the current era and cheer for their bloody victory in battle. But rarely are they seen as human.
The movie adaptation of the 1980’s TV show The Equalizer has had a long journey to the big screen, with several different stars and directors involved at various points. Jason Statham and Russell Crowe were rumored stars, while attached directors included Paul Haggis (Crash) and Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive). What we’ve finally ended up with is Antione Fuqua directing Denzel Washington in the lead role – a re-teaming of the duo that brought us Training Day, which gave Denzel an Academy Award.
The director of Training Day (2001) (a respectable movie to say the least) has made the most hilariously ridiculous, cringe-inducingly bad movie I’ve seen in some time. Boasting a cast of renowned actors like Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Angela Basset, even this ensemble could not save it. Olympus Has Fallen opens on Christmas eve, showing a happy president, a happy first lady, a really happy kid, happy bodyguards – until something awful happens (of course).
