(2 / 5)
Nearly a decade on from the first movie, I find myself reviewing the third and reportedly final instalment of Denzel Washington-Antoine Fuqua’s Equalizer franchise.
For the conclusion of a trilogy, albeit one with no narrative through-line, The Equalizer 3 might be the most confusing blockbuster I’ve seen since Tenet.
Opening with an action sequence that, based on the trailer, seems like a finale, followed by what seems to be a fairly conclusive character beat, my assumption afterwards was what followed would take place in flashback. After all, our titular vigilante, Robert McCall (Washington), had just seemingly wiped out the Camorra, the Sicilian Mafia, before receiving an apparently fatal wound from a suitably ironic perpetrator. Instead, rescued by a passing carabinieri (Eugenio Mastrandrea), McCall awakens in a small, picturesque town on the coast.
Life in Altamonte is idyllic and McCall quickly settles into a routine: tea at the local cafe, where he strikes up a flirtation with a waitress (Gaia Scodellaro); fish from the local fishmonger (Daniele Perrone); dinner with the kindly doctor (Remo Girone), who is caring for him. It’s then, once he’s ingratiated himself into the community – unsurprisingly, as the strongest element of the previous Equalizer movies – that the Camorra arrive and begin exacting a toll on those McCall has come to care about.
This is not for McCall’s sins, as you might suppose, but just because this is what the Camorra do; with remarkable blatancy and stupidity, given how successful they are. While it’s difficult to argue with someone waving a gun in your face, threatening your kids, and occasionally stringing up granddad, their tactics are so brutal and unthinking and unnecessary1 that, led by the stupid, thuggish Marco (Andrea Dodero) and his more refined but equally stupid older brother Vincent (Andrea Scarduzio) they scarcely seem a fair match for McCall.
Washington remains convincing in the role of stone-cold bad-ass, though now, at age 68, more weight is placed on the former aspect than the latter.2 There are few memorable set-pieces of which to speak and those peculiarly derivative, if revealing of the franchise’s sole writer Richard Wenk’s influences this time around. There’s a town-square confrontation straight out of Shane and a night-time raid that’s one horse head shy of a full-blown Godfather parody, if Don Corleone was an idiot.3
Too much time is devoted to a terrorism subplot that seems mainly designed to reunite Washington and his Man on Fire charge, Dakota Fanning; now playing an inexperienced but steely CIA agent in whom McCall has an unexplained interest. That interest, when explained, is clearly intended as a sort of payoff for the trilogy, but in the current context it just seems arbitrary.4
Washington is still wry and charming, and Fuqua’s direction adds a certain dynamism that would make other geri-actioners jealous, but, fun as it is to see justice meted out to the seemingly untouchable, The Equalizer 3 is ultimately less than the sum of its parts.
All things – good, bad, or indifferent – must come to an end, and, all things being equal, it makes as much sense as anything to end this here.
- A handful of serious offences are perpetrated as a result of career mafioso using their own van to carry out a preplanned crime.
- Most of his kills take place offscreen.
- Though McCall prefers apples to oranges. In biblical terms, take from that what you will.
- It also sent me scurrying to IMDb to confirm that, no, it was Chloë Grace Moretz who’d played the child prostitute in the first movie.
