(Credit: Netflix)

After the success of the 2014 action thriller The Equalizer, Denzel Washington returned in his role as vigilante Robert McCall four years later. This time, as opposed to Russian mafiosos, he was tasked with combating treacherous double-agents from inside his own former unit at the US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA).

For his first mission in the movie, he counts on the help of his former colleague Susan to rescue a kidnapped child. Susan effectively becomes his vigilante partner, as he continues his work helping those in need. That is, until Susan is called on a mission of her own in Brussels, with another mutual colleague of hers and Robert’s at the DIA, Dave York.

Earlier in the movie, there’s a double murder carried out by unidentified American assassins of a married couple who speak to each other in French. After shooting the wife, one assassin tells the husband, “I got your name on a piece of paper in my pocket. That’s all that matters.” He then places the gun into the husband’s hand and forces its barrel into his mouth, to make the act look like a murder-suicide.

It turns out that the man is Mr Calbert, who worked for the DIA. Susan and York are assigned to investigate what happened to him. While Susan enters Calbert’s apartment, York hangs back in the building’s lift. When Susan enters the place, she’s ambushed by a gang of French-speaking assassins. Robert later hears that she’s been killed.

But why was Susan attacked?

It turns out that the reason Dave York hung back from joining Susan in the Calbert apartment is because he was behind the attack on her. Robert finds this out when he goes to York’s home, to ask him about why he’s found his number listed on another assassin’s phone.

In that scene, two-thirds of the way through the film, York reveals all. “What happened, Dave?” Robert begins. York shares that he’s become a private contract killer, because his entire DIA department has been shut down since Robert went missing, presumed dead. He’s still “killing names on a piece of paper,” he retorts. “Only now, now there’s a price next to them.”

Robert corners him about Susan’s death, and he acknowledges he was behind it. “No one knew the Brussels contract was a deep agency asset,” he explains, referring to Calbert. With this sentence, he shows that he and his team were contracted to kill the Belgian agent, without knowing that he was, in fact, working with the DIA, too.

“Susan was gonna figure out it was in that dining room.,” he adds. “She was the only one who could have, right?” Susan would have worked out that York was behind the killings, so she had to be disposed of. A flashback shows York covering a bloodied Susan’s mouth as he fatally stabs her in the stomach. It wasn’t the Belgian gang who finished her off. It was him.

Susan was within a few minutes of uncovering the entire contract killing operation York is running with his former DIA team members. By revealing the truth to Robert, he makes him the next in line to be silenced.

For the rest of the movie, Robert must overcome York’s fellow hitmen before finally doing away with the man himself. Susan Plummer is arguably not given enough weight or screen time in the film for us to feel the same connection to her as we did to Alina in the first instalment of The Equalizer, or as we will to CIA operative Emma Collins in The Equalizer 3.

Nevertheless, she acts as the bridge between us, the audience, and Robert’s late wife, Vivienne, a presence throughout the movie notable through her absence. Having killed off Vivienne before the start of the saga, screenwriter Richard Wenk does well to depict Susan as a proxy for Robert’s feelings of loss and grief, before brutally snatching her away from us.