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