Let’s make a very partial list of Best Second Times Out:
(1) Godfather II: The first was fantastic. The second was amazeballs. Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino together for the first time. (See the film Heat for them together in one of the best scenes in film history.)
(2) The Empire Strikes Back: The first Star Wars film put us on our heels. The second, trading on the fact that Harrison Ford’s Han Solo was the best-developed character in the film, made us fly. Everybody else needed a muppet or magic or something to make the plot go.
(3) Equalizer 2: If you don’t have a weakness for Denzel Washington’s acting, you’re barely sentient. In addition to which, this is early Pedro Pascal, and that’s thrilling, but keep your eye on Ashton Sanders as Miles. The scenes between Washington and Sanders, directed by Antoine Fuqua, are some of the best black cinema in history. “You need to be a gangster, a killer. Little Yummy, huh…? Five pounds of pressure. That’s all it takes.” I could watch their scenes forty times and not get bored.
(4) The Dark Knight. Christian Bale is a great Batman, and looks appropriately pretend-clueless as Bruce Wayne. But of the three Christopher Nolan Batman flicks, the second is the masterpiece. It would survive on its own. It would also have extraordinarily deep and true things to say about the nature of evil, about emptiness, about power and about the limitations of power. And while the film has enough glory to shed on all its cast and crew, no serious film-lover doubts that it’s Heath Ledger’s Joker that cracks into the space usually reserved for Marlon Brando or Jack Nicholson: the space where the realism genuinely terrifies us because it’s exactly right.
(5) Desperado. It’s tough to beat the idiosyncratic and inventive Once Upon A Time In Mexico. Both films draw on Quentin Tarantino and other maestros of balletic violent soul to create an amazing opera of mayhem. But Desperado is tighter, stands all by itself, and of course features one of the best high-dialogue cameos ever in Steve Buscemi and the single best low-dialogue cameo in history in Danny Trejo (who has it in his contract that he has to die if he plays a bad guy in all his films). It doesn’t hurt to have Antonio Banderas and Selma Hayek playing with wit and sexy Latin charm.
