Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Equalizer 3’ on Netflix, Another Denzel Washington Thriller About An Aging Assassin

 Denzel Washington once again plays brutal assassin Robert McCall in The Equalizer 3 (now streaming on Netflix), apparently the final film in the series based on the 1980s TV series, and the actor’s fifth collaboration with director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day). It’s also one of those Denzel movies that has us wondering why one of his generation’s greatest actors keeps making boilerplate action-thrillers like this – see also: Safe House, Deja Vu, 2 Guns, the other two Equalizers, etc. – slightly more watchable, in-between more substantive and memorable efforts (The Tragedy of Macbeth, Fences, even Flight). But I guess mediocre movies with Denzel in them is better than no Denzel movies at all, right?

THE EQUALIZER 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Subtitle: SICILY, ITALY, it reads, making sure we know the sweeping golden vineyards in this establishing shot aren’t in, I dunno, Sicily, North Dakota? A man and his young son pull into a winery and find the place littered with bodies and spattered with blood. Some of those bodies were merely shot to death; another, the subject of a grisly closeup, has a hatchet embedded in its face. Neat! Have these guys been EQUALIZED? Looks like it. And sure enough, this Italian gent ain’t long for the world either, because Robert McCall (Washington) is inside, waiting, primed and ready to get really, really brutally violent. And get really, really brutally violent he does – but he also ends up taking a bullet in the back. How’d that happen? Might McCall be getting sloppy with old age?

The bleeding McCall passes out and wakes up in Altamonte, a seaside postcard town. Local cop Gio (Eugenio Mastrandrea) found him and took him to the local doctor, Enzo (Remo Girone), a friendly sweetheart of a man who treats him and puts him to bed in what looks to be his own house, which is something that only happens to movie characters who might get in trouble if they were taken to, you know, an actual hospital. As McCall convalesces, he wanders through the town with a cane, taking in the old-world sights and avoiding the new-world security cameras he spots here and there. He sits in a cafe and orders tea and still spreads out napkins just so on the table, and uses his own spoon, because he never leaves behind his methodical, sorta-OCD self, even in lovely, romantic locales like this.

He also never leaves trouble behind, because without trouble, we’d have a drama movie instead of an action-thriller movie. McCall makes a call to the CIA, where he talks to Emma Collins (Dakota Fanning!), tipping her off about the criminal whatnot that occurred back at the winery, and kicking off a 98 percent superfluous subplot that mostly just junks up the story. McCall also starts thinking that Altamonte might be a great place to settle down and re-retire. The locals are friendly, especially cafe owner Aminah (Gaia Scodellaro), who takes him out on a date. But this isn’t a utopia. The town is terrorized by members of the Camorra, an infamous cadre of organized criminal scumbuckets who routinely shake down the locals for money, and beat them up, and destroy their property. This certainly looks like a job for a guy who has no problem slamming a hatchet into an evil mfer’s face, doesn’t it?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The wandering-amoral-assassin plot is lifted directly from samurai sagas like Yojimbo and old Westerns. And whenever I see a badass lead in an action-thriller who starts thinking he’s Too Old For This Shit, Clint Eastwood’s Blood Work immediately comes to mind.

Performance Worth Watching: It’s a testament to the man’s charisma that Denzel is nevertheless intriguing in the disappointingly underwritten role of a man whose amorality comes home to roost – at least a little bit, anyway. 

Memorable Dialogue: McCall and the doc chat about relative moralism:

McCall: Am I a good man or a bad man, you asked me.

Enzo: And you said you didn’t know.

McCall: I don’t know.

Enzo: Only a good man would have said that.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: A goodly chunk of Equalizer 3 exists in an odd Nothing Zone where action sequences are backburnered, and we get to enjoy some nice photography (courtesy veteran cinematographer Robert Richardson) while Denzel should be given an opportunity to deepen his character with some real acting, but never really gets it done. With Denzel, it’s obviously not a question of talent; it’s the material, which is thin and dissatisfying like watery gravy on your mashed potatoes. Our emotional involvement here is minimal, and the scenes that should cement our interest lack impact. Bluntly put, it’s a snooze, and we’re left with the nagging feeling that it should be considerably more engaging, and make better use of its extraordinary star.

Fuqua makes the film a sort of exercise in contrasts – the peace that Altamont represents and that McCall yearns for is counterbalanced by his penchant for gruesomely brutal violence. And he won’t find that peace without getting gruesomely brutally violent one last time, so cue that cliched shot of the big bell in the town tower, which tolls for who? FOR THEE, of course, especially if THEE are the local heavily tattooed thuggery zooming around on motorcycles. The Fanning/CIA subplot gets in the way a bit (and doesn’t quite go nowhere, although the payoff is a slightly raised eyebrow at best) as McCall inevitably does his thing for perhaps his most noble cause. And that’s when the poetry of the on-location photography crosses over with the savagery of which our protagonist is all too capable, the film’s two primary aesthetics coming together at last, and all we’re inspired to do is shrug at this curiously noncommittal exercise in B-movie familiarity.

Our Call: The Equalizer series goes out with a whimper. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.