THE EQUALIZER 2 (2018) Behind-the-Scenes Action Breakdown

When you're doing a sequel, you better deliver with more exciting action. It's a mistake to go to war with us, McCall. We're trying to make it feel honest and real and vicious. You got it backwards, Dave. You're going to war with me. It's a chance to see Robert McCall exhibit more badassery. I think the incredible appeal to this character is, it's the ultimate badass actor playing the ultimate badass role. And we were able to do some really cool things in the first one. Robert McCall speeds very fast. We shoot it in a lot of cuts because if he does it all at once, we'll never know what he did. And Robert McCall actually uses his hands. I get more conversations about the corkscrew through the guy's chin more than anything else I've done. And in this movie, the equalizing sequences are very much in keeping with what Robert McCall does. He can assess a situation in milliseconds, decide distance and threats faster than anyone. And again, he's using the things in the environment, the things in the room. What equalizing vision is, as close as I can get with cinema to show how men of violence respond to chaos. We use the Phantom camera that shoots at about 500 frames per second, and that gives you the ability to slow time down. For guys like Robert McCall, the heart slows down. The vision gets sharper. They become more aware of everything in the room. We're able to show almost those cat-like reflexes that he possesses, where he can just spot something that split second, which gets him to act a second quicker. You knocked on the wrong door tonight, Pops. There's no rules. If you're fighting for your life, anything goes. Denzel's just this badass. He just boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. He uses whatever. And action! It actually is a fact that if you use a flashbang on top of flour, it will ignite. He uses his glasses. All these things I got from real guys. There's nothing in the movie that can't happen. In this movie, we see Robert McCall doing much more hand-to-hand fighting. We're utilizing my boxing skills more than we did in the first one, so I have more of a sense of what he does, what kind of fighting he does. What we do is we go and scout the locations first, kind of give Antoine some ideas with camera angles. We show him, and Antoine's awesome. He's very, very informative. He'll tell us what works, what doesn't. Say, no, don't do that. We made a few minor adjustments. And our actor actually is very fast with his hands, and he picks this stuff up really quick. What's awesome about him is that he, you know, puts in his two cents and what he would like to change, and he's been killing it so far. Then we had a fight scene up on the real tower that was an old war tower. And our stunt guy, JJ, really wanted to do the stunt where they fall off this tower. And the wind was getting stronger off the ocean, so you have to worry about whether it's gonna blow a guy the wrong way. That was very challenging. We go in there knowing what the danger was, but it was awesome, and I think with everything coming together, it's a pretty cool little scene. Yeah, just try it, try it the best you can. Not to turn your head, just give us one good one. All right, Antoine, ready to try one? Three, two... We really have a good team of stuntmen, and we have a good team of stunt coordinators and trainers. And the work starts months in advance. So we spent a lot of time designing these action sequences that make them feel even more ******* cool than the first one.