Review: The Equalizer 3

There aren't a lot of surprises left in the vigilante genre. What made the first Equalizer movie stand out was a third act swerve into slasher-style horror that made it pretty clear that Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) was basically the good guy murder version of someone like Friday the 13th's Jason. He was an unstoppable killing machine happy to use the tools at hand - and the first film's final showdown took place in the hardware store where he worked, so you know there were plenty of tools handy - to get the job done.

This third installment (the less said about the disappointing second film the better) opens with McCall having already murdered an entire Sicilian Mafia stronghold, casually waiting (at gunpoint) for the boss to arrive so he can also murder him - and finish off a few other henchmen foolish enough to still be sticking around. But when a shock twist sees McCall catching a bullet in the back on the way out, it looks like he might be on his way out for good. Roll credits? Not yet.

Rescued by the only cop on the planet who takes a gunshot victim passed out in his car to a kindly old local doctor, McCall slowly heals up and makes a few calls to the CIA (played here by Dakota Fanning) to tip them off about the dead Mafia guy's shady stockpile of drugs and cash. Unfortunately, the living Mafia has its eye on the small Italian town McCall has come to love, seeing prime real estate being sat on by a bunch of fish sellers and cafe owners they plan to move on by any (nasty) means necessary. Guess it's time once again for McCall to take out the trash.

Being the human embodiment of Death itself, there's not a lot of suspense (but definitely a lot of satisfaction) when McCall goes up against the bad guys. Director Antoine Fuqua turns this to the film's advantage, in part by staging the big action scenes as stalk-and-slash horror sequences (complete with over-the-top gore), where the end result is never in doubt. Seeing the bad guys get what's coming is the whole point of the exercise, and McCall does not disappoint.

McCall is also a vigilante who likes to be proactive. Despite the utterly predictable story, the film keeps the suspense up by messing with the usual rhythms of an action thriller; the bad guys suffer a defeat, they sulk back to regroup, we're expecting a breather but McCall is already waiting there to get back to work. It's not a trick audiences will fall for forever, but in a 100 minute thriller it's pretty effective.

Everything else is solid without distracting from why we're here. The cute town that needs protection is a maze of steep stairs and cliffside dwellings so it's interesting enough to look at, the locals are all cliches but they only get a scene or two so they're never boring, and the Mafia guys are scum through and through - we first meet chief dirtbag Vincent (Andrea Scarduzio) throwing a wheelchair-bound old man out a window - so their gruesome and occasionally prolonged deaths are well deserved.

As for Washington, he's having fun playing a man who doesn't seem particularly tortured by a lifetime of perfecting the art of mass murder. There's hints of nuance here and there (he's too good an actor not to mess around a little), but this feels like one of the installments in a long-running series where the lead's backstory remains in the background. He's a professional: both he and The Equalizer 3 get the job done in admirably efficient fashion.

- Anthony Morris

Review; Gran Turismo

Despite all the early focus on gamers, Gran Turismo turns out to be a fairly traditional sports movie, where "extremely good at playing Gran Turismo" serves roughly the same function as "naturally talented but from the wrong side of the tracks". Fortunately, as sports movies go this is a good one: sometimes sticking to the basics pays off.

Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe) is a UK teen who's extremely good at the Playstation racing simulator Gran Turismo and not all that good at getting through to his father (Djimon Hounsou) that his pastime is just as much a real sport as soccer (which his father played at a professional level, with his older brother firmly on the same path). Sadly, professional racing is a rich man's game, and there's no career path from racing simulated cars to driving the real thing. Or is there?

Meanwhile in Japan, marketing guy Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom) is pitching an crazy idea to his bosses at Nissan. Today's drivers don't care about cars, but Grand Turismo players do: what if they created a contest where the winner got to drive race cars for real, thus inspiring a generation of gamers to take their skills onto non-virtual roadways? Management says yes - so long as nobody dies.

To manage this, Moore turns to grumpy burnt out mechanic Jack Salter (David Harbour, who gives a performance way above and beyond what this kind of film requires), mostly because nobody else wants to be responsible for a bunch of gamers losing control of race cars at lethal speeds. His approach is to basically neg the drivers constantly, and rightly so. Oh wait, here comes Jann: could he possibly he the one to melt Salter's heart and make good on the track?

There aren't a lot of surprises here (being based on a true story obviously limits the possible twists), but the stakes are just low enough that the challenges have real dramatic tension. Jann obviously isn't going to win a big race first time out, but is he good enough to come fourth once in six races and earn his formal qualifications? Is his faltering media presence going to be so big a stumbling block (this is a marketing campaign after all) that Moore might cut him loose even if he's the best racer? Is he ruthless enough to survive in a world where fatal accidents are part of life?

Director Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Chappie) pulls out a bunch of camera tricks and a lot of game-style graphics to give the races that something extra. But fast cars going extremely fast is the real appeal here and he films the races with a punchy mix of hyperbole (camera zooming into engines, drone camera zooming across the track) and gritty realism that makes them thrilling viewing. 

The off-track plot strands are less flashy but equally effective, stripping a collection of traditional subplots (the disapproving father, the cocky rival, the new girlfriend, the evil adversary, the disapproving mentor who has to be won over) down to their bare essentials and throwing them all into the mix. 

Add in a range of winning performances - Bloom's marketing man is just sleazy enough to be convincing without being a bad guy, Harbour is deserving of his own spin-off where each movie he trains up a new batch of out-of-their-depth kids, and an always likable Madekwe is convincing as a slightly awkward teen whose only real drawback is his lack of confidence in himself - and you've got a rock-solid sports film that's a lot better than it should be. 

Especially as it's basically a commercial for both the Playstation version of Gran Turismo and Nissan. If this leads Hollywood to decide the more brands your film features the better the film is, when we get a slasher movie that cross-promotes McDonalds, Black & Decker, Adidas, Patagonia and Kings Funerals we'll know who to blame.

- Anthony Morris