Film - The Equalizer 2

I've not seen the first one, nor do I remember watching the - what seemed - the quite gentle TV series (wait, wasn’t he played by a white man?) but this, dear reader is not gentle. It didn’t matter I hadn't seen the first Equalizer film as 2 tells the story of how Robert McCall came to provide a free avenge service for the good and against the bad folk of Boston and beyond.Now a widower, retired secret agent McCall is still in touch with his former colleague and husband but everyone else thinks he’s dead. He drives a taxi which seems to be just so he can the injustices of this world for him to correct. The scene is set when a guy puts a visibly upset girl in the back of his car and asks for her to be safely taken home. After finding out what happened, he instead takes her to the hospital to have her stomach pumped and goes back to beat the hell out of the arrogant group of guys that assaulted her. ‘But she’s just the intern’.An avid reader and learner (my type of person), the story of why he went to the Middle East to recapture a kidnapped kid from her father unfolds throughout the film too. We get to learn about his past walk through his meeting with former colleague who is worried about him since his wife's death and this sets us up for the main case he needs to resolve.What is gentle is how he befriends the kid on the street who is at risk of a life of crime rather than pursuing his beloved art after his brother is shot and killed. However McCall also looks out for his neighbours and listens to the stories of his regular elderly passenger, a holocaust survivor who is always talking about the sister he lost contact with during the war. They live in Boston so it’s always raining, a legitimate way of adding to the gloomy scenes. The showdown to end the film  set in a stormy seaside town makes perfect sense.Whilst bloody and gruesome in equal measures, the bad guys throughout the Equalizer 2 are arrogant p***ks. So all in all, McCall provides a much-needed bit of superhero-type goodness in a dark world.7/10