All Denzel Washington needs to do is brood, deliver ultimatums in his measured baritone and dispatch bad guys in the most cartoonishly violent ways to make a film eminently watchable. He has done so successfully under Antoine Fuqua in the first two Equalizer films and continues in the same vein in Equalizer 3, the third, and possibly the final, instalment of the series and it still doesn’t get boring.
After mercenaries and the Russian mafia, government assassin-turned-vigilante Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) is now taking on the Italian mafia on their home turf. Equalizer 3 begins with the aftermath of a carnage in a vineyard in Sicily as the owner — a man on the most wanted list of Interpol — follows a trail of bodies, dispatched in increasingly gruesome ways, to find Washington who quietly tells him he has nine seconds to choose. Of course the man makes the wrong choice and three more bodies join the others, one of them stabbed in the eye with his own gun.
A gun wound — McCall seems to have gone a little soft and he is as surprised by it as we are — lands him under the care of a kind-hearted doctor in a picturesque small town near Naples in Italy. As he recuperates, he gets adopted by the locals. He hangs out at the local cafe drinking tea, buys fish from the local seller and makes his way around town. He does dial in the Sicilian vineyard locale to CIA agent Emma Collins — played by Dakota Fanning, Washington’s Man on Fire co-star, and their banter is a nice break from the intensity of the film — which adds a bit of drug trade and terrorism to the mix. Why McCall was in Italy in the first place is not really important (and when revealed is as ludicrous as is fitting of the film) because it is what he does there that matters.
Washington holds your attention even when he is just laying out his napkins and wheezing slowly up numerous flights of stairs. His charismatic presence is enough to keep you focused on the screen. But the crazy violence is never too far away. McCall discovers that this idyllic town with its kind-hearted people where he has found peace is under the thumb of the Camorra, the Italian Mafioso, who terrorise locals for protection money and want to turn the town into a tourist resort. And he doesn’t like it at all and gets ready for some equalising.
The chief antagonist in town is Marco (Andrea Dodero), who doesn’t like McCall’s dead-eyed stare. Too bad he doesn’t take McCall’s warning seriously and ends up stabbing himself with his own knife, of course, assisted by McCall. And as it turns out, Marco has a big bad brother called Vincent, who is the Mafioso head and is involved in the drugs found in the Sicilian vineyard.
Now Vincent comes to avenge his brother’s death, promising to lay waste to the small town, only to meet with resistance from the whole town who stand behind Roberto, as McCall is called there. But McCall doesn’t wait for Vincent to regroup; he appears out of the shadows like an avenging angel and takes down each and every person in Vincent’s villa, some shot in the head, some strangled, some hanged, some speared through the throat with a poking iron. The gleeful violence is not for the weak-stomached, so those new to the series be warned. But those who are fans of the series get exactly what they came for.
The villains might not be great, the plot may be formulaic but Fuqua and Washington once again deliver a vastly entertaining film with Washington showing why he is still one of the best action heroes out there. If this is his last outing as the Equalizer, he is going out on a high note, but we certainly hope he is not done with playing a vigilante.
