Wait, there’s another Equalizer movie? Was there really a demand for another one? The first two were decent enough it you just want a light something with some decent thrills, but I had no idea the second did well enough to justify a third. And yet, here it is. I can generally count on lead actor Denzel Washington’s natural screen charisma to do a lot of heavy lifting in just about anything, but director Antoine Fuqua has never really impressed me much. His best work often works because frequent collaborator Washington is in the lead role, and that is hardly a guarantee of much of anything.
And this is supposed to be the end of a trilogy? This was a trilogy? Well, Labor Day weekend isn’t really a good weekend for new releases, so why not?
Robert McCall (Washington) is doing a job for parties and reasons unknown in a Sicilian vineyard when he takes a bullet and nearly dies. He’s saved when a cop from the small village of Altamonte, a remote sort of town where everyone pretty much knows everybody else. The cop takes McCall to the local doctor who patches McCall up and lets him stay as he recovers from his injury. Not long after he’s able to hobble about a bit, McCall makes a call into the CIA and informs young agent Emma Collins (Dakota Fanning) about the vineyard because whatever was going on over there is something big. Meanwhile, Robert begins to notice the local mafia types collecting protection money from the local businesses around Altamonte, and if there’s anything that bothers Robert McCall, it’s when bad guys push around people who can’t fight back.
As it is, one heck of a bad guy has some designs on the town: big time mobster Vincent Quaranta (Andrea Scarduzio) is looking to build some hotels and resorts there, and he’s is absolutely the sort of monster that used to populate the action movies of my youth, something that became apparent to me within five seconds of seeing the guy before he even did something truly evil. Sending his little brother (Marco Quaranta) on ahead, he has his designs on the town just as McCall is finding peace for himself there. With Emma looking into whatever was happening in the vineyard and getting some help from McCall, it seems as if the mob might have gone barking up the wrong tree.
You know, I said above that this is supposed to be the end of a trilogy, and for the life of me, I can’t see how. I wouldn’t call The Equalizer 3 a bad movie. In fact, I think I might like it better than the second one where the thing was set up as a murder mystery only for me to figure out exactly who the killer was before the reveal due to a distinct lack of suspects. This time around, it did seem as if the reason that brought McCall to Sicily in the first place had nothing to do with the rest of the movie–indeed, the reason he’s even there isn’t revealed to at all until the movie’s nearly over–but the script does eventually start connecting things. Granted, the scene that does connect the plots is about as clumsy as a scene in this sort of movie can be, but the script does start connect the plots.
But is it a good end to the trilogy? I don’t recall off-hand enough about the previous two movies to say if McCall had anything like a character arc, and the movie certainly ends in a way that could set up another. But there are some effective scenes of McCall at work, and at least they aren’t playing like this is all some kind of mystery this time around. As a straight-up action movie, it’s fine, I suppose. It’s nothing special, but that could describe this whole series. Maybe that will lead to fourth. Maybe not. All I know is, if it happens, I suspect I will be surprised to see another one. That seems to be how I always react to these movies.
Grade: C+
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